Over the last few years, the FCC has been targeting robocallers who are trying to scam Americans. Most recently, the FCC is going after scammers who are using robocalls to trick Americans into giving up personal information or pay a fee to get student loan debt relief.
To do this, the FCC has asked telecom providers to block a group of spammers called Urth Access LLC who reportedly spammed people with calls asking them to hand over money or personal information in order to get $10,000 in student loan forgiveness.
According to reports, Urth Access, LLC accounted for 40% of the robocalls in October 2022.
“Scam robocalls try to pull from the headlines to confuse consumers,” FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in a statement posted online. “Trying to take advantage of people who want help paying off their student loans. Today we’re cutting these scammers off so they can’t use efforts to provide student loan debt relief as cover for fraud.”
The FCC is hoping that by blocking Urath Access to US telecoms, they may slow down their calls as the FCC goes after them.
“We will continue to deploy all of the tools in our arsenal to eliminate bad actors’ access to U.S. communications networks in furtherance of their schemes,” Jessica Rosenworcel added in the FCC press release.
It has been reported that Americans were scammed out of about $29.8 billion thanks to phone scams in 2021 according to Truecaller.
In 2020 the FCC approved a new set of systems called SHAKEN and STIR meant to help identify fake robocalls. Well, it has made robocall scams harder sadly it has not stopped them. As always, when the FCC makes changes, scammers try to find new workarounds.
Many robocallers are located outside of the US so the FCC’s recent efforts have been working hard to block their access to our telecom networks. We will have to see how that works in the years to come.