OBA urges FCC to increase role in halting telecommunications fraud

The OBA is currently discussing with its congressional delegation about the importance of the FCC stepping into a more active role in stopping telecommunications-enabled fraud.

Telecommunications fraud — robocalls, spoofed caller ID, and bank/agency impersonation — is no longer a nuisance; it is a primary vector for financial crime hitting Oklahoma consumers and the community banks that serve them.

• Americans received roughly 2 billion robocalls in a single recent month — about 13 per person, or 1,600 calls every second.
• Imposter scams — many originating by phone or text — cost U.S. consumers over $3.5 billion in reported losses in 2025; robotexts are now the single most common contact method scammers use.
• Unwanted and fraudulent calls remain the FCC’s own top consumer complaint year after year.
• Bank and financial-institution impersonation is a growing sub-category — the FCC itself has recently taken action against providers transmitting Walmart- and bank-impersonation robocalls — but community banks are left absorbing reimbursement costs and reputational damage while the underlying call traffic keeps flowing.
• Community banks and their customers — including the roughly 170 community banks in Oklahoma — are frequent impersonation targets; every fraudulent “your account is locked” call or text erodes trust in legitimate bank communications and shifts real cost onto banks and consumers.
• Rural and elderly Oklahomans are disproportionately targeted and disproportionately harmed by successful scams.

While the FCC has made some moves to help mitigate some of these issues, we’d like to see more help. Some of the recommendations we’d like to see the FCC implement include:

• Finalize — don’t just propose — the pending numbering-resource and foreign call center rules, on a fixed timeline, notwithstanding industry objections.
• Close the foreign origination gap through binding agreements or blocking authority for gateway providers that fail to stop known bad international traffic.
• Formal coordination with the FTC, Treasury/FinCEN, and bank regulators specifically on financial-institution impersonation, so telecom-level blocking and bank-level fraud reporting are linked rather than siloed.
• Use forfeiture authority aggressively now that the Supreme Court has confirmed it, with penalties sized to deter repeat and foreign-linked violators, not just small domestic providers.
• Public timeline and reporting on the March 2026 NPRMs so Congress and industry can track whether “proposed” becomes “final.”

While the OBA will continue to talk with our representative and senators in Washington, it would also be of assistance if our bankers became involved. We hope you will take the time to urge the FCC to strengthen some of their standards.

We will keep you apprised of this issue in the coming weeks and months.