Attorney General Brown pushes FCC to strengthen “Know Your Upstream Provider” rules to combat illegal robocalls

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Attorney General Derek Brown and a bipartisan coalition of 48 other attorneys general are urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to strengthen its “Know Your Upstream Provider” (KYUP) requirements to keep scammers from using the U.S. phone network to make illegal robocalls. KYUP rules require voice service providers to accept calls only from legitimate, responsible providers, not wave through the bulk of illegal traffic instead. 

“Every annoying robocall you receive is supposed to be checked by a cell phone provider whose job it is to know who they are doing business with. Increasingly, that critical check is not happening, and the bad actors know it — and exploit it,” said Attorney General Brown. “We want the FCC to make this check more robust, make the penalties real, and make it much harder for these bad actors to hide.”

A phone call travels through a series of phone companies before it reaches your phone, and the FCC requires each voice service provider to take reasonable measures to vet the companies that originate and route those calls. Some skip that step, letting illegal robocalls onto the network. Last year, Americans received more than 29.6 billion scam robocalls and texts and lost nearly $2 billion to these scams.