Attorney General Gentner Drummond has taken a swing at the persistent thorn in Oklahoma's side: robocalls. With the launch of Operation Robocall Roundup, Drummond is spearheading an effort to eliminate the annoyance for the state's residents. In collaboration with a group of attorneys general, Drummond is serving up warning letters to a cohort of 37 phone companies accused of ferrying illegal robocalls to Oklahomans, as reported by the official Oklahoma government website.
"Oklahomans are tired of being bombarded with illegal robocalls during dinner, family time and throughout their day," Drummond stated on the Oklahoma Attorney General's Office. Tackling this nuisance, the phone companies on the receiving end of these warnings are alleged to be breaking federal rules. These infractions include failing to cooperate with government tracing efforts, not registering with the federal database to combat robocalls, and by not filing actionable plans to mitigate these unwanted calls on their networks. With the baton passed from one phone company to the next, these illegal calls eventually find their way to interrupt the daily lives of Oklahomans.
This group of 37 companies are criticized for sitting back while robocallers hijack their networks. As a consequence, other legitimate phone companies processing calls from these alleged rule-breakers could be complicit. Over 100 other companies are receiving cautionary notes for their associations with the non-compliant ones, a fact also confirmed on the official Oklahoma government website.
Looking back to 2022, Drummond united with 50 other attorneys general to form the Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force, targeting the spate of illegal and fraudulent robocalls flooding American phone lines. Stemming from this coalition, Operation Robocall Roundup swings into action as the latest initiative to bring phone companies into compliance with federal consumer protection standards. For more details on this crackdown, the task force investigates and takes action against these companies, with more updates likely to follow as they make progress, Drummond said.
