Attorney General JB McCuskey and a bipartisan coalition of 48 attorneys general are pushing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to strengthen its “Know Your Upstream Provider” (KYUP) requirements to help prevent scammers from using the U.S. phone network to make illegal robocalls. KYUP rules require voice service providers to ensure that they receive calls from legitimate and responsible providers and do not regularly pass through lots of illegal calls.
“Strengthening the FCC’s Know Your Upstream Provider rules put the responsibility of verifying that providers are real and legitimate on voice service suppliers—stopping scammers before have a chance to rip off hard-working West Virginians,” Attorney General McCuskey said.
Phone calls get routed through a series of phone companies before they reach consumers’ phones. The FCC requires all voice service providers to vet the phone companies that originate and route calls. However, some voice service providers fail to do so, allowing illegal robocalls onto the U.S. communications network. Last year, Americans received more than 29.6 billion scam robocalls and texts and lost nearly $2 billion to these scams.
The attorneys general want the FCC to strengthen voice service providers’ obligation to vet their upstream provider customers, and to require the same scrutiny and diligence of the entities involved in the implementation of STIR/SHAKEN, the technical standards designed to combat caller ID spoofing on phone networks—the practice robocallers use to fake or “spoof” the number that shows up on your caller ID, often making it look like a call is coming from a local number, a government agency, or someone you know.
The attorneys general argue that the FCC should require upstream provider monitoring more regularly to help prevent bad actors from operating unchecked. The coalition is calling on the FCC to ensure providers are aware of and comply with their caller ID authentication obligations and that the rules are consistently followed by every entity that is responsible for ensuring that caller IDs displayed for consumers are accurate. The attorneys general ask the FCC to quickly establish penalties and require retention of KYUP data for law enforcement or attorneys general can refer to it in future investigations.
Attorney General McCuskey is part of the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force, which launched Operation Robocall Roundup in 2025.
In phase 1 of the operation, the task force sent warning letters to 37 smaller voice providers that were disregarding their obligations to mitigate the origination and transmission of illegal and/or suspicious robocalls by failing to comply with certain baseline mandates from the FCC. Just two weeks ago, the FCC issued an order to six of those companies, ordering them to fix their robocall protection issues or risk losing the ability to route any calls across the U.S. telephone network.
In phase 2, the task force expanded its crackdown to four of the country’s largest intermediate voice service providers and pushed the FCC to strengthen its Know Your Customer rules to require phone companies to verify who is making calls using their networks and what kinds of business their customers are conducting.
Attorney General McCuskey is joined in signing this letter by the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.
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