A bipartisan coalition of 49 state attorneys general is urging the Federal Communications Commission to tighten the rules governing who can buy and resell phone numbers, arguing that cutting off scammers’ access to legitimate numbers is the next front in the robocall fight.
The reply comments, filed in response to the FCC’s March Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on numbering policies, were co-led by the attorneys general of Colorado, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Nearly every state signed on, a level of bipartisan consensus rarely seen in consumer protection filings.
Why it matters: The crackdown on caller ID spoofing pushed bad actors toward a new tactic: buying huge quantities of real, legitimately acquired numbers and cycling through them faster than analytics engines can flag them. The AGs cited one North Carolina enforcement case in which a defendant placed more than 17.3 million calls in a single day, using almost every number no more than once or twice. Americans received roughly 29.6 billion scam robocalls and texts last year and lost nearly $2 billion to the schemes.
What the AGs want: The coalition backs the FCC’s proposal to extend certification requirements, under penalty of perjury, to all providers that obtain and assign numbers, and to expand foreign ownership disclosure rules to make it harder for overseas operators to hide behind shell companies. They also want the Commission to go further by:
- Requiring all resellers, not just direct access providers, to file usage reports so investigators can trace calls through every hop in the call path
- Prohibiting the sale of standalone numbers untethered to any calling or texting service
- Banning number cycling outright
- Restricting free trial numbers, which the task force says are routinely abused by government, Amazon, and bank imposters
The industry angle: The number cycling section deserves close attention from anyone making outbound calls. The AGs acknowledged that some legitimate callers rotate numbers because analytics tools mislabel or block their lawful traffic, but rejected that as a justification. Their answer: call branding solutions under the FCC’s separate Call Branding docket should address improper labeling, and cycling designed to evade analytics should be banned regardless of intent. For collectors already navigating call labeling and blocking, that position signals states see number rotation as a red flag, not a workaround.
The AGs also endorsed mandatory Know Your Customer and Know Your Upstream Provider practices, with the threat of revoking access to numbering resources for providers that fail to comply.
The filing builds on the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force’s Operation Robocall Roundup, which sent warning letters to 37 voice providers in August 2025 and expanded to four of the largest U.S. providers in December.
