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Robocalls are an industry-wide problem that affects customers of all providers.  New technology has enabled spammers across the world to make billions of calls per month, usually using illegal caller ID spoofing.  In September 2018 alone, Americans received a record 4.41 billion robocalls, 2.68 billion of which involved scams or telemarketing.  (Source.) 
 
And the number continues to increase dramatically: in just 2018, weve seen an increase from 2.4 billion robocalls in January 2018 to a staggering 4.41 billion robocalls in September. (Source.)  No one is immune: even Ajit Pai, the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, receives spoofed, unlawful robocalls on a regular basis.  (Source.)
 
Scams comprise an increasingly larger percentage of these calls.  (Source.)  Of the 30.5 billion robocalls made to American numbers in 2017, approximately 30 to 40 percentover 10 billionwere scams.  (Source.)  As of September 2018, that percentage had already climbed to 61 percent, or nearly 20 billion.  (Source.)  So-called neighbor scamswhen the scammer illegally spoofs a local number, hoping the recipient will be more likely to answer the phoneare also on the rise: they increased 750 percent in 2017.  (Source.)  Consumer complaints to the Federal Trade Commission have also gone up, from approximately 63,000 complaints filed monthly with the FTC in 2009 to over 375,000 monthly complaints in 2017. (Source.)
 
In response, the FCC and the FTC are working hard on solutions, enforcing existing and creating new ones.  The FCC has imposed over $200 million in fines against spoofers and scammers in 2018 alone, and has declared that combatting unlawful robocalls and malicious caller ID spoofing [is its] top consumer protection priority.  (Source.)   The FTC is likewise aggressively enforcing the Do Not Call Registry (Source)against human and robotic telemarketers alike (Source). 
 
Until this year, it was illegal for providers to block incoming calls, even those that were obviously illegal.  But earlier this year, new rules went into effect that will allow providers to block calls purporting to be from numbers of trusted entities that do not actually make calls from those numbers (e.g.,the IRS call scam), from invalid numbers (like those with area codes that don't exist), from numbers that have not been assigned to a provider, and from numbers allocated to a provider but not currently in use.  RingCentral is working hard to implement these new methods without interfering with wanted calls. 
 
RingCentral is also participating in industry efforts to develop a new call authentication framework, called SHAKEN/STIR, which promises to revolutionize providers ability to block illegal robocalls.  (Source.)   RingCentral is participating through its industry group, the VON Coalition.