FCC (“Do not call me”) registry is unavailable, are we protected?
Well, this is mainly for us living in the USA. As published on January 2, 2019 at the FCC pages (please check this link: Impact of Potential Lapse in Funding on Commission Operations, document DA/FCC #: DA-19-10), the Federal Communications Commission is dealing with the lapse of funding due to the overall situation actually discussed in Parliament.
Update : Today, at the end of January 2019, the FCC / DNC registry is back at work. Crossing fingers for their duty!
You might have probably noticed that there is some outage also touching the wages for state employees including Police, Fire departments etc. However, this also includes some automatic parts of the Commission.
This is taken from their report list (available on the same page as provided above):
„In the event of a continued partial lapse in federal government funding, the Commission will suspend most operations in the middle of the day on Thursday, January 3, 2019.
During a lapse in funding, the Network Outage Reporting System (NORS), the Disaster Information Reporting System (DIRS), the Public Safety Support Center (PSSC), the Licensing Management System (LMS), the Consolidated Database System (CDBS), the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS), the Universal Licensing System (ULS), the Electronic Document Management System (EDOCS), the Auctions Public Reporting System (PRS), the Auction Application System, the Auction Bidding System, the Daily Digest, and the Commission Online Registration System (CORES) will remain available. All other Commission electronic filing and database systems will be unavailable to the public until normal agency operations resume.“
For us, people dealing with unsolicited calls and telemarketing nuisance calls, this means one main point. The possibility to report any bad call is actually limited. Nowadays, people are not able to send their reports to the DNC database.
(At the same time, all telemarketers, call centers and other phone marketing companies actually must remain using the same rules as previously. They still must check any number before calling to the final customer. At least, this is a good news.)
How to report a spam number now?
Although the possibility to report a spam number via FCC Registry is limited, there are still other systems and ways how to do it – with a spam blocking app.
For example, in the Should I Answer app you can report a bad number just after the call ends. This information will be published to other community members in the same second (or after you get connected to the internet with your mobile device). Next day all users will be notified about this new threat.
Please don’t let the bad boys enjoy the FCC lapse and report all new threats! Check if your spam blocking app allows you to report spam. And if it doesn’t, use the Should I Answer app.
If you don’t have any blocking app in your phone, you still can report spam when browsing the internet. Just go to the Should I Answer website, search the respective number and write your report there. It will be visible on our pages immediately and we will process it during just a few hours for all mobile users worldwide. The next day, all of them will have this warning in their local off-line databases. Your information is essential to keep all of us informed and protected.
Get protected against spam calls
This is not relevant only for the people living in the USA, but for every nation using some version of the “Don’t call me” registry. It doesn’t matter if from Europe, Asia, America or any other country or continent. If you feel that there is something not working on the side of your protectors, you have always some other solution available for your mobile phone.
Download the Should I Answer app – Android version,
or get the Should I Answer app for iOS