The FCC’s new anti-robocall rules prevent surprise charges for consumers

Americans have been getting inundated with robocalls for years, and the issue has only been getting worse. According to YouMail, which provides a service that can block those calls, people in the US received 58.5 billion robocalls in 2019. That’s 22 percent more than 2018’s. The STIR/SHAKEN protocol gives carriers a way to verify that a call is legitimate before it even reaches the recipient. It can help reduce the effectiveness of illegal spoofing, which is a technique commonly used by robocallers to fool consumers into thinking they’re taking calls from a government agency or from someone in their area.