New York Initiates Two New Laws Aimed at Fighting Robocalls

Have you noticed that the number of calls about your vehicle's extended warranty have tapered off a bit? It might have something to do with two new laws regarding robocalls in New York.

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Whenever I get one of those calls telling me that my car warranty is about to expire and that I need to talk to someone right away in order to keep it active, I chuckle, and then I block the number. My car is 16 years old. Its warranty expired a long, long time ago.

Another favorite thing that I do when spam calls come in is to hand my phone to my six-year-old. He enjoys chatting with people and can typically keep someone on the phone for a couple of minutes before they realize that they're speaking to a child. We always get a good laugh out of scamming the scammer.

In November of 2021, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law two bills that address the annoying and often irritating issue of robocalls and now that the new year is here, both laws are officially in effect.

The first law requires telecommunications companies in New York to block calls that are not legitimate - in other words, spam calls. This includes numbers that are part of a "spoofing" scheme. A spoofing scheme is one in which the true caller identity is "masked behind a fake, invalid number.”

The second law that will target robocalls requires phone providers to use a call authentication system that uses something called cryptography to verify that a call really is being placed by the number that shows up on caller ID displays.

According to the National Review, using the required call authentication system will make it easier to "trace illegal calls back to their source, since each call will have-an identification assigned to it." This means that it is going to be a lot easier to nail down scammers and take legal action against them.

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Source: New York Initiates Two New Laws Aimed at Fighting Back Against Robocalls