Diverse Interests Urge That FCC Tackle Robotext and Robocall Fraud

Jessica Rosenworcel. “The Organizations joined together for this meeting because they are united in their commitment to combating criminals who attempt to defraud consumers by impersonating legitimate businesses through illegally spoofed calls and text messages,” said a filing posted Monday in docket 17-59. Among the groups at the meeting were the National Consumer Law Center, the American Bankers Association, America’s Credit Unions, ACA International, the Bank Policy Institute, the Mortgage Bankers Association and Edison Electric Institute. Bank impersonation texts were the most common form of text scam reported to the FTC in 2022, they noted. A community bank located in the Midwest with less than $500 million in assets was a target of a mass texting campaign two weeks ago, the filing said. “A criminal sent a fake fraud alert to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the bank’s customers,” the groups said: “If the customer replied to the fraud alert, the criminal called the customer, displaying the bank’s phone number on the customer’s Caller ID (i.e., an illegally spoofed call) and claiming to be from the bank. The criminal then used social engineering (i.e., publicly available information about the customer) to persuade the customer to reveal their banking log-in credentials.” The bank fielded approximately 600 calls from customers and others targeted by the scam.