Commission Implements New Caller ID Rules, Urges Congress to Expand Its Authority

Under the new rules, violators can be fined up to $10,000 for each violation or three times that amount for each day of continuing violation, with a maximum $1 million in fines for continuing violations, the commission said in a news release. It said the FCC also gives itself the authority to levy fines against “entities it does not traditionally regulate without first issuing a citation.” The rules still allow callers to mask their IDs for legitimate reasons, such as to protect battered women, the commission said.

"With the Truth in Caller ID Act, Congress took an important step to re-securing the integrity of the telephone number as a reliable identifier of a call’s origin,” the report said. “We recommend additional steps that can be taken toward this end as the TDM technology on which telecommunications service is widely based is increasingly supplied by VoIP technology, and as text messaging continues to supplement and replace voice communications.” The law only targets scammers in the U.S., for instance, the report said. The FCC ought to be given the authority to target foreign con artists, too, it said: Congress took similar steps in the CAN SPAM Act of 2003.

Congress should also “consider providing guidance whether it intended additional IP-enabled voice services, such as VoIP services that enable callers only to make outgoing call to users of telecommunications and interconnected VoIP services, to be brought within the scope of the Truth in Caller ID Act,” the report said. Several commenters in the FCC’s rulemaking proceeding suggested that the act should be “interpreted to reach services not currently within the Commission’s definition of interconnected VoIP services,” but the commission rejected those suggestions. “Because expansion of the reach of the Truth in Caller ID Act to one-way interconnected VoIP services via a revision to Rule 9.3 would be a significant change, as to which Congress has not provided any specific indication of its intent, Congress may want to consider providing guidance whether it intends for the Truth in Caller ID Act to apply to calls made with such additional IP-enabled voice services,” the report said.

The commission also lacks “appropriate authority” to regulate third-party spoofing services, the report said. In comments during the proceeding, the Justice Department recommended that the FCC “require third-party spoofing providers to verify that a user has authority to use the telephone number the user is seeking to have substituted for the user’s calling number,” which “would make it far easier for law enforcement to identify” scammers, the commission said. “In light of the serious and weighty concerns identified by DOJ involving law enforcement’s need to track criminals who use third party caller ID spoofing services, we recommend that Congress revisit the Truth in Caller ID Act’s apparent acceptance in some instances of the practice of spoofing phone numbers that the caller lacks authority to use, including granting the Commission appropriate authority to adopt rules preventing third-party providers from allowing unauthorized use of substitute phone numbers."

Besides monitoring “new and emergency communications services,” Congress also ought to consider changing the act so that text messages are explicitly covered by it, the commission said. “We have observed that the use of SMS-based text messaging service is growing faster than cellular voice service and is subject to many of the same caller identification manipulation vulnerabilities as voice calling.”