With the FCC September 28 mandate upon us, many are wondering what that could mean for inbound calls to the United States.

It’s no surprise that spam and illegal robocalls have caused consumers to stop answering their calls. Especially when you consider that more than 6.3 billion spoofed calls were made as of March 2021, according to FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, and the fact that $1.8 billion is lost annually due to fraudulent activities, including “wangiri” one-ring scams.

As part of the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) crackdown on illegal robocalls, by June 30, 2021 all U.S. voice service providers must file certifications in the publicly available Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD) to provide detailed information regarding their implementation of the STIR/SHAKEN caller ID authentication framework and/or a robocall mitigation program.

The Secure Telephone Identity Revisited (STIR) / Signature-based Handling of Asserted information using tokens (SHAKEN) framework gives phone companies the tools needed to cryptographically sign and verify calling parting information to help mitigate illegal robocalls.