Guest Post: Kudos to Attorney General Stenehjem for Joining Fight Against Illegal Robocalls

This guest post was submitted by Cheryl Riley, president of AT&T Northern Plains

Three cheers to North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem for joining with 50 other states attorneys general, AT&T and 11 other national telephone companies to help protect customers from illegal robocalls.

This is a great move for North Dakotans tired of receiving these annoying, illegal calls at all hours of the day and night. According to the Attorney General’s office, robocalls were the No. 1 consumer complaint in North Dakota last year.

The fight against these scammers requires all hands on deck, and we welcome and appreciate the support of AG Stenehjem.

[mks_pullquote align=”left” width=”300″ size=”24″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]AT&T has made no secret of its desire to more aggressively target illegal and unwanted robocalls on its network. AT&T is working every day to protect its customers from the onslaught of robocalls.[/mks_pullquote]

This effort aligns with much of what AT&T is already doing to protect our customers against illegal and unwanted calls.  We offer our in-network, call blocking and labeling tool, AT&T Call Protect, at no charge to our customers. And we’ve recently partnered with other carriers to roll out cross-network call authentication.

AT&T has made no secret of its desire to more aggressively target illegal and unwanted robocalls on its network. AT&T is working every day to protect its customers from the onslaught of robocalls.

Since late 2016, AT&T has blocked or labeled nearly 600 million suspected fraud calls and more than 1.4 billion suspected spam calls. In addition, apart from these tools, AT&T’s global fraud team identifies and blocks traffic it believes to be illegal, and has blocked more than five billion such calls on AT&T’s network.

This is an ongoing battle, however, and AT&T urges consumers to take advantage of the free services, including AT&T Mobile Security and AT&T Call Protect, that automatically block fraud calls, provide screen alerts for suspected spam calls and help protect smartphones from potential threats.

Customers can visit AT&T’s Cyber Aware Robocalls and Unwanted Calls page for more information on how to help block and report unwanted calls and texts.

The FCC also provides resources for consumers at fcc.gov/unwanted-calls.