News, Culture and NPR for Central & Northern Michigan
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
91.7FM Alpena and WCML-TV Channel 6 Alpena are off the air. Click here to learn more.

Michigan Attorney General urges FCC to crackdown on illegal robocalls

Karolina Kabat

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has joined with all 50 attorneys general to urge the Federal Communications Commission to crackdown on illegal robocalls.

Officials said Michigan has seen hundreds of millions of robocalls since the beginning of the year, and the federal government needs to help protect Michigan residents.

Kelly Rossman-McKinney is a spokesperson for the Attorney General.

“Spoofing calls are calls that look like they come from your area code they look like they might be familiar numbers and so you have a tendency to answer those and they are just like robocalls but they’ve faked you out,” she said.

Rossman-McKinney said spoofing calls have personally affected the office of the Attorney General.

“We here in the Attorney General’s office have been amazed at the number of robocalls and spoofing calls we get while sitting in meetings about robocalls and spoofing calls,” she said.

As part of ongoing crackdown efforts 50 Attorneys General and 12 phone companies last week released an agreement to help fight robocalls on a state level.

The agreement includes phone companies notifying law enforcement of suspicious activity.

Rossman-McKinney said in their letter to the FCC the Dana Nessel was particularly interested landline caller ID authentication to help prevent illegal calls to seniors and rural residents.

Residents can write down the numbers of unwanted callers and submit those numbers to the Attorney General’s complaint office here: https://secure.ag.state.mi.us/complaints/consumer.aspx