Attorney General Dan Rayfield is calling on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to close loopholes that let scammers flood the U.S. phone network with illegal robocalls. The coalition wants the FCC to require phone companies to do a better job vetting who they do business with, so scammers can’t sneak calls through while providers look the other way.
“Oregonians shouldn’t have to treat every unknown call like a threat,” said Attorney General Rayfield. “Scammers are exploiting gaps in a system that’s supposed to protect people, and some phone companies are letting it happen because it’s profitable to look the other way. If a company profits from routing calls onto our phones, it has a responsibility to know who it’s doing business with, and the FCC needs to hold them to that.”
Here’s how it works: when you get a call, it usually doesn’t come straight from the caller to your phone. It passes through a chain of phone companies along the way. Federal rules already require those companies to take reasonable steps to make sure they’re not doing business with shady operators who send scam calls. But some companies skip that step, and illegal robocalls get through as a result. Last year, Americans received more than 29.6 billion scam robocalls and texts and lost nearly $2 billion to these scams.
AG Rayfield and the bipartisan coalition of 48 other attorneys general want the FCC to hold phone companies to a higher standard for checking their business partners, and to apply that same level of scrutiny to the system that verifies a caller isn’t faking, or “spoofing,” the number that shows up on your caller ID.
Specifically, the coalition is asking the FCC to:
- Set clear minimum standards for vetting. Phone companies should be required to collect real, verified information about the companies sending them calls, check that those companies are actually following the rules, keep an eye on them over time, and cut ties with the ones that aren’t.
- Check in more often, not just at sign-up. Right now, phone companies mostly review their business partners when they first sign a contract, renew it, or get a tip that something’s wrong. The attorneys general say that’s not enough — checks should happen on a regular basis so bad actors can’t operate unnoticed in between.
- Strengthen caller ID protections. The system that’s supposed to stop scammers from faking phone numbers only works if everyone in the call chain follows the rules. The FCC should make sure that happens consistently, for every company involved, not just some of them.
- Move fast, add real penalties, and keep records. The coalition wants the FCC to act quickly, set meaningful penalties for companies that don’t meet these standards, and require companies to keep records of their vetting so law enforcement and attorneys general can use that information in future investigations.
The FCC’s existing requirement that phone companies vet their business partners is sometimes referred to as the “Know Your Upstream Provider,” or KYUP, rule — “upstream provider” being the industry term for the company that hands a call off to the next link in the chain before it reaches your phone.
Attorney General Rayfield is part of the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force, which launched Operation Robocall Roundup in 2025.
In the first phase of that effort, the task force sent warning letters to 37 smaller phone companies that were ignoring their responsibility to stop illegal and suspicious robocalls from moving through their networks. Just two weeks ago, the FCC ordered six of those companies to fix their robocall problems or risk losing the ability to route calls on the U.S. phone network at all.
In the second phase, the task force:
- Expanded its crackdown to four of the country’s largest phone companies that route calls between other providers.
- Pushed the FCC to strengthen its rules requiring phone companies to verify who’s actually using their networks to make calls, and what kind of business they’re running./li>
Attorney General Rayfield is signing this letter along with the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
