Governor Kathy Hochul signed a pair of bills on Monday aimed at cracking down on invasive robocalls — but don't expect the scammers to lose interest in your car's extended warranty anytime soon.
The new legislation is aimed at pushing telecommunications companies to do more to stop the scourge of robocalls that has cost Americans billions of dollars and seeded near unanimous suspicion of unknown numbers in recent years.
"New Yorkers are fed up with annoying, predatory robocalls, and we're taking action to stop them," Hochul said in a statement.
The first piece of legislation codifies a recent federal rule — known by the acronym STIR/SHAKEN — requiring phone carriers to adopt protocols to digitally authenticate calls and prevent spoofing.
Under the standards, networks are able to validate the source of phone calls, allowing providers to block obviously fraudulent numbers or warn of potential spam.
A second piece of legislation signed by Hochul on Monday goes a step further, giving the state's Public Service Commission authority to oversee compliance with the protocols.
Paul Schmitt, a research computer scientist at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, said the oversight could close a gap in the FCC's attempted crackdown.
"One of the problems with the federal standard is that every service provider can make their own choices in terms of blocking things and not blocking things," Schmitt said. "If the public service commissioner actually says we are going to have a standard rubric for all of our telecom providers, that might change things."
Since the STIR/SHAKEN protocols took effect in June, the volume of robocalls has decreased nationwide — though the number of scam text messages has jumped.
Prior to that, Americans lost nearly $30 billion to scam phone calls over a 12-month period, according to a survey from Truecaller. More than 59 million Americans said they'd fallen victim to such scams, a threefold jump from four years ago.
"These people make a lot of money doing this, they're going to continue to find cracks in the system," Schmitt said.
He noted that the protocols are far from a silver bullet, in part because scammers can still flood people with calls from authenticated numbers.
Still, Schmitt said that New York's new law was a good "first step," adding that it would help weed out the shadiest of callers.
"Its going to be challenging to actually end this permanently, but this sort of legislation does help."
