Virginia's Top Robocallers, Crackdown Boosted By Phone Companies

RICHMOND, VA — Virginia's attorney general says phone companies have agreed to curb the more than 120 million illegal robocalls made each month in the Commonwealth. Twelve phone companies have agreed to adopt eight principles to fight illegal robocalls and make it easier for attorneys general to investigate and prosecute bad actors nationwide, officials said Thursday.

A record 5.2 billion robocalls were placed nationwide in January 2019, while 4.7 billion such calls were made last month, according to YouMail's robocall index, and a majority of them were scam or telemarketing calls. That includes 123.5 million robocalls in Virginia in July 2019, an average of 16.5 for every person in the state.

“Robocalls are not only annoying, but they can also be potentially dangerous and could scam Virginians out of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars," said Attorney General Mark Herring. "With these principles we will be able to attack illegal robocalls from both sides by attempting to stop them from coming through and also having more tools to investigate and prosecute them."

Here are the top 20 robocallers in Virginia last month, showing the number, the caller ID and the type of call. They include legitimate debt collectors, credit card companies, Comcast and a cell phone company, along with spammers.

1. 757-449-7147
unknown persistent caller
Unknown Robocaller

2. 800-955-6600
Capital One Payments/Collections
Bank/Credit Card Payment Reminder

3. 855-245-7098
Transworld Systems Incorporated
Debt Collector

4. 877-647-8552
Wells Fargo
Bank/Credit Card Payment Reminder

5. 703-936-8907
Generic Scammer
Generic Scammer

6. 804-309-3424
Payment Reminder
Payment Reminder

7. 703-783-7132
Generic Scammer
Generic Scammer

8. 703-952-1459
Generic Scammer
Generic Scammer

9. 888-423-0900
Verizon
Payment Reminder

10. 757-330-0142
Generic Scammer
Generic Scammer

11. 757-743-2027
Generic Scammer
Generic Scammer

12. 757-529-8039
Bank/Credit Card Payment Reminder
Generic Robocaller

13. 804-588-3159
Payment Reminder
Payment Reminder

14. 800-531-8722
USAA
Financial Customer Call

15. 757-414-7282
TELE INNOVATIVE
Unknown Robocaller

16. 703-255-8062
Navy Federal Credit Union
Financial Customer Call

17. 757-702-1014
Generic Scammer
Generic Scammer

18. 855-895-3382
Fingerhut
Payment Reminder

19. 757-716-7251
MASSIMO
Unknown Robocaller

20. 800-266-2278
Comcast
Customer Call

Phone carriers participating in the crackdown include AT&T, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, Charter, Comcast, Consolidated, Frontier, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon and Windstream.

Herring's office said phone companies will work to prevent illegal robocalls by:

• Implementing free call-blocking technology at the network level;
• Making available to customers additional, free, easy-to-use call blocking and labeling tools;
• Implementing technology to authenticate that callers are coming from a valid source;
• Monitoring their networks for robocall traffic.

Phone companies will assist attorneys’ general anti-robocall enforcement by:

• Knowing who their customers are so those making robocalls can be identified and investigated;
• Investigating and taking action against suspicious callers – including notifying law enforcement and state attorneys general;
• Working with law enforcement, including state attorneys general, to trace the origins of illegal robocalls;
• Requiring telephone companies with which they contract to cooperate in traceback identification.

The FCC offers a few tips for those wanting to stop unwanted and illegal robocalls. Among them, don't answer calls from unknown numbers, do not respond to questions — especially those that can be answered with "yes" — and never give out personal information such as account numbers, Social Security numbers and mother's maiden names.