JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Today, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway announced that she has joined a bipartisan coalition of 49 attorneys general urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to strengthen its Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD), a key tool used to prevent illegal robocall providers from accessing the nation’s communications network. The coalition argues that stronger safeguards, greater transparency, and increased accountability are necessary to keep bad actors out and reduce illegal robocalls targeting consumers.
“Unwanted robocalls are more than a nuisance. They are the gateway to fraud, identity theft, and financial exploitation,” said General Hanaway. “Missourians deserve stronger protections from bad actors who abuse our communications networks. These commonsense improvements will help prevent abuse, promote accountability, and better protect consumers across our state.”
Voice service providers are required to submit a filing with the RMD before they can accept and route call traffic through the U.S. communications network. That filing must include information about the provider’s business and robocall mitigation practices. Downstream providers are only allowed to accept calls from providers that are included in the RMD. However, bad actors are currently able to enter and stay in the database with minimal effort and limited impediments.
The attorneys general are urging the FCC to strengthen the RMD through stricter verification requirements, greater transparency, and stronger safeguards against bad actors. They argue that these improvements would make the database a more effective tool for promoting accountability, detecting suspicious providers, and reducing illegal robocall traffic nationwide.
In comments submitted to the FCC, the attorneys general urged the agency to:
- Verify that information submitted to the RMD is accurate and complete before providers are permitted to route calls.
- Require additional disclosures regarding related entities, third-party service providers, numbering resources, and business operations.
- Strengthen procedures for suspending and removing bad actors from the database and preventing them from re-entering under new names.
- Require providers to certify compliance with FCC robocall rules and respond promptly to traceback requests.
- Increase transparency by making historical RMD filings available to law enforcement and the public.
- Implement the proposed reforms as quickly as practicable while maintaining existing anti-robocall protections.
General Hanaway is a member of the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force, which launched Operation Robocall Roundup in 2025 to combat illegal robocalls nationwide. In the first phase of the operation, the task force sent warning letters to 37 voice service providers that failed to comply with FCC robocall mitigation requirements. Since then, the FCC has taken enforcement action against many of those providers, including removing some from the Robocall Mitigation Database and preventing them from routing calls across the nation’s telephone network.
The second phase expanded the effort to larger telecommunications providers and supported additional reforms aimed at cutting off scammers’ access to legitimate phone numbers, strengthening customer verification requirements, and improving oversight of providers transmitting call traffic through the network.
General Hanaway joined this letter alongside the attorneys general of Alabama, Alaska, American Samoa, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, District of Columbia, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, 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, U.S. Virgin Islands, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.