- Utah joins 48 states urging the Federal Communications Commission to increase efforts to combat robotic scam calls.
- Attorney General Derek Brown highlights scammers' tactics using legitimate phone numbers.
- Proposed measures include stricter certification and reporting for phone number sales.
SALT LAKE CITY — When your phone rings, how sure can you be that a human is on the other end of that line?
Every month, roughly 20 million Utah phone numbers are inundated with robotic, spam phone calls from scammers.
More broadly, Americans in 2025 received approximately 29.6 billion scam robocalls and texts — a 16% increase from the year prior, amounting to a loss of nearly $2 billion via phone scams.
In a move aimed at combating this rise in robot calls, Utah Attorney General Derek Brown on Wednesday joined 48 other attorneys general to urge the Federal Communications Commission to strengthen rules that would cut off scammers' access to the legitimate telephone numbers they use to reach their victims.
A release from the Utah Attorney General's office said that at one time, scammers relied on illegally using other people's phone numbers to make calls appear to come from a legitimate company or government agency.
But after the federal government and state attorneys general cracked down on spoofing, scammers shifted tactics — now purchasing legitimate phone numbers and using them to make robotic calls — cycling through millions of new numbers to avoid spam filters.
"Every Utahn deserves to know that when their phone rings, they can trust that the person on the other end is who they say they are," Brown said in a statement. "Scammers buy real phone numbers, use them until spam filters catch on, and then just buy new ones. We're calling on the FCC to make it harder for scammers to get their hands on real phone numbers in the first place."
More specifically, the group of attorneys general is asking the FCC to:
- Require every company authorized to purchase and resell phone numbers in North America to meet stronger certification requirements and disclose how and to whom they assign numbers.
- Require these companies to submit regular reports on the sale and use of numbers, so law enforcement can trace illegal robocalls to their source and hold every company in the call path accountable.
- Require anyone applying for phone numbers to certify they will not use them to make illegal robocalls.
- Block the sale of phone numbers to buyers not connected to a real calling or texting service.
- Prohibit "number cycling," in which an entity buys numbers in bulk and rotates through them, sometimes using each only once, to evade tools that flag robocall numbers.
- Restrict the offering of trial numbers that scammers exploit to harm consumers.
