COLUMBUS — Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost announced Thursday that an agreement has been penned between several major phone service providers and his office, all in the interest of cutting back on illegal robocall activity, according to a press release.
The release says 50 other attorneys general and 12 different phone service providers, including Verizon, Sprint and AT&T, have agreed to adopt practices that will help cut back on illegal robocalls and "make it easier for attorneys general to investigate and prosecute bad actors."
Under the agreement, the press release states service providers will adopt a few new practices to help. Service providers in the agreement have vowed to begin implementing call-blocking at the network level at no cost to customers. This includes providing customers with free call-blocking and labeling tools. They've also agreed to monitor their networks for robocall traffic, and implement technology that will verify calls are coming from a valid source.
Service providers have also agreed to investigate and report suspicious callers to law enforcement, and work with local law enforcement to trace back to the origins of illegal calls.
Companies included in the agreement are AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Spring, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Verizon and Windstream.
