Have you ever received a call or text from a number that looked legitimate? Maybe it had your area code and displayed a user from a reputable business or government agency, but then it turned out to be a bad actor looking to swindle you out of money? Well, Mississippi is now part of a nationwide effort to prohibit that from happening.
Attorney General Lynn Fitch on Wednesday joined a bipartisan coalition of 49 of her peers in urging the Federal Communications Commission to strengthen rules that would cut off scammers’ access to legitimate and local telephone numbers. The attorneys general argue that without that access, scammers would not be able use seemingly-legitimately phone numbers to hoodwink Americans.
“Unsolicited robocalls and robotexts are too often a gateway to scams, and fraudsters are constantly looking to exploit loopholes in the law,” Fitch said. “We are working hard to protect consumers from these invasive, annoying, and potentially dangerous calls and texts, and we need a strong federal partner to stand strong with us.”
Scammers used to primarily manipulate other people’s phone numbers to make it look like a call was coming from a legitimate company or government agency, the attorney generals contended. But action by state officials across the nation and the federal government made it harder for scammers to engage in illegal spoofing.
Now, scammers often purchase legitimate phone numbers and use them to make robocalls. Scammers may cycle through millions of brand new phone numbers, which helps them avoid detection by spam filters. In one case included in the letter, scammers made more than 17.3 million calls on a single day through one phone company but rarely used the same number more than twice, the attorney generals added.
Last year, Americans received approximately 29.6 billion scam robocalls and texts and lost nearly $2 billion to these scams. Just since January 1, 2026, the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office has sent 173 tracebacks and 61 subpoenas, resulting in 60 robocallers being terminated.
In their letter to the FCC, the AGs also asked the agency to:
- Require every company authorized to purchase and resell phone numbers in North America to meet stronger certification rules and share how and to whom they are assigning numbers.
- Require companies to submit regular reports about the sale and use of numbers, so law enforcement can trace illegal robocalls back to the source and hold all the companies in the call path accountable for selling or transmitting numbers used to conduct illegal robocalls.
- Block the sale of phone numbers to entities that aren’t tied to a calling or texting service.
- Prohibit number cycling, which is when an entity buys lots of numbers and then uses them on a rotating, sometimes single-use basis to avoid being detected by tools that flag numbers used to make illegal robocalls.
- Restrict the offering of trial numbers.
In Mississippi specifically, Fitch’s team launched a no-call complaint and enforcement mechanism earlier this year as part of the AGO in Action app.
