In testament today, the American Bankers Association when again prompted the Federal Trade Commission to embrace rulemaking to restrict the impersonation of federal government, companies and their authorities, and to restrict entities from offering the “means and instrumentalities” for another to impersonate a federal government or company. The proposed guideline is indicated to broaden the solutions offered to victims of impersonation scams. ABA accompanied other associations in 2015 in assistance of the guideline, and it repeated that assistance throughout a public hearing on the proposition.
“Bad actors regularly impersonate banks, credit unions, other financial service providers, healthcare companies and other legitimate callers by illegally ‘spoofing’ phone numbers belonging to these businesses,” stated Paul Benda, SVP for functional danger and cybersecurity at ABA. “Additionally, bad actors send text messages from numbers that appear to belong to a legitimate business, often including links to fake websites, or send a text message from the bad actor’s own number, making it appear that it is from a legitimate business, with the intent to defraud the recipient.”
ABA prompted the commission to settle the guideline as quickly as practical. It likewise asked the commission to enforce liability on telephone business that supply customers with unauthenticated and falsified caller ID details in the customer’s caller ID display screen. “We understand there are technical challenges fully implementing the caller ID authentication protocol STIR/SHAKEN but strongly believe that unless that data can be authenticated at the highest level from the origination point of the call to the consumer, that it should not be allowed to show any name on a consumer device and unknown caller data should be shown instead,” Benda stated.
