The Federal Communications Commission today unanimously voted to move forward with proposed rulemaking to impose stronger “know your customer” requirements on voice service providers that originate calls. In addition, the FCC plans to soon take up a related proposal to remove voice service providers from U.S. networks when they enable illegal robocalls.
The American Bankers Association has called on the FCC to require voice service providers to take specific actions to verify the identity of callers in order to shore up the existing call authentication framework – commonly known as the ‘STIR/SHAKEN’ framework – to better protect consumers against fraud. The proposed rule advanced today seeks comment on requiring providers to obtain certain information from their customers (i.e., callers) before the customer is allowed to make calls on the provider’s network. In addition, the FCC proposed to assess penalties for violations of the KYC rule on a per-call basis to best correlate penalties to the volume of illegal calls made.
The FCC also plans to vote on a related proposal at its May meeting to improve its “know your upstream provider” and STIR/SHAKEN requirements by requiring all providers in the call’s pathway to take steps to prevent illegal calls from transiting the network. Citing data ABA provided demonstrating criminals are able to obtain “A-level” or “B-level” attestation — the highest levels of attestation available — for a fraudulent call, the FCC proposes steps to ensure attestations are only provided to legal calls. It would also close STIR/SHAKEN implementation loopholes.
