Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost has partnered with 50 other attorneys general to help fight illegal robocalls. Yost's office announced in a press release that 12 major phone service providers — including Verizon, Sprint and AT&T — have agreed to adopt "anti-robocall practices" to help protect consumers and make it easier to prosecute "bad actors."
“This agreement brings phone service providers on board as critical allies in our fight against illegal robocalls,” Yost said in the release. “By adopting these commonsense business practices, service providers will reinforce our ongoing efforts to crack down on this growing nuisance.”
According to his office, under this new initiative, the partnership will work to prevent illegal robocalls by:
- "Implementing call-blocking technology at the network level at no cost to customers"
- "Providing customers with free, easy-to-use call blocking and labeling tools"
- "Implementing technology to verify that calls are coming from a valid source"
- "Monitoring their networks for robocall traffic"
Yost's office also says that the phone companies have claimed they will work with the attorneys general to enforce the fight against robocalls by identifying and investigating the bad actors and taking action against suspicious callers, which includes "notifying law enforcement and state attorneys general" and tracing the origins of those illegal calls.
The release says, "Going forward, the phone companies will stay in close communication with the coalition of attorneys general to ensure that robocall protections develop as technology and scam tactics change."
The full list of phone service providers includes AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Verizon and Windstream.
