Dive Brief:

• A group of tech and communications companies announced they plan to work together to help stop “robocalls,” Reuters reports.
• The companies, which include AT&T, Apple, Comcast, Google and several others, officially formed a “Robocall Strike Force” last week to help end the automated, prerecorded phone calls.
• The group wants to create a method to block calls from spoofed phone numbers, as well as those that imitate valid phone numbers from legitimate organizations.

Dive Insight:

Spoofers use tech to conduct their work, and little has been done until now to try to stop them. Yet the calls are a huge source of customer complaints

AT&T Chief Executive Officer Randall Stephenson, chairman of the new group, said the strike force plans to report to the FCC by Oct. 19 on recommended actions to stop robocalls.

"This is going to require more than individual company initiatives and one-off blocking apps," Stephenson told Reuters. "Robocallers are a formidable adversary, notoriously hard to stop."