Queen Creek, Arizona — Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes and the attorneys general of 48 other states this week urged the Federal Communications Commission to strengthen rules that would cut off scammers' access to legitimate telephone numbers.
"Scammers shouldn't be able to buy their way around the rules," Mayes said. "It's time for the FCC to make it harder to get a phone number and easier to catch the criminals who abuse them."
The bipartisan coalition asked the FCC to require stronger certification for companies that resell phone numbers, regular reporting on how numbers are assigned, and a prohibition on "number cycling," a tactic in which scammers rapidly rotate through millions of fresh numbers to dodge detection.
Last year, Americans received about 29.6 billion scam robocalls and texts and lost nearly $2 billion to such scams, according to figures cited in the letter. Officials said scammers have shifted from spoofing real numbers to buying legitimate ones after earlier enforcement curbed spoofing.
