The FCC just closed major loopholes used by businesses and scammers to send an avalanche of unwanted calls and texts

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• FCC commissioners agreed to update the group’s rules regarding spam calls and texts.
• The new ruling closes a major lead generation-based loophole that’s plagued consumers for years.
• Political emails and texts are unaffected.

The Federal Communications Commission has elected to close major loopholes used to acquire contact information from and mass-send significant numbers of robocalls and texts to American consumers.

FCC commissioners voted 4 to 1 to adopt the new rules on Wednesday, according to a press release.

Among the new rules, the release notes, include regulations that “make it unequivocally clear” that lead generators and online shopping sites can no longer robocall or robotext consumers without their explicit consent.

“Comparison shopping websites and lead generators must obtain consumer consent to receive robocalls and robotexts one seller at a time – rather than have a single consent apply to multiple telemarketers at once,” the release notes.

The new rules give the FCC permission to “red flag” select phone numbers and forbid mobile carriers from letting them send out text messages. They also increase the scope of the federal “Do-Not-Call” registry to apply to unwanted marketing text messages, as well.

In December, Business Insider spoke to Colin Sholes, an expert who has covered the ethically dubious tactics used in lead generation in his scam-centric publication. He said the FCC’s new rule changes have been “a long time coming” and predicted they’ll make a sizable impact in decreasing the number of spam calls and texts consumers receive each day by putting companies “out of business” for using “slimy” tactics.

“Even knocking a fraction of those people out of the market, or just having them go to other models, will be a good thing for consumers, because the people this impacts the hardest are the people that are the most vulnerable,” Sholes said, pointing to senior citizens who frequently get duped in Medicare fraud schemes.

The FCC has spent much of 2023 working to combat the scourge of robocallers and robotexters. In early August, the commission fined an international network of robocallers close to $300 million for sending out more than 5 billion robocalls to around 500 million numbers over the course of three months in 2021.

The FCC’s new rules may decrease the amount of scam robocalls and texts received by American consumers, but they won’t have any effect on political or campaign-related messages. Sholes told Business Insider that political campaigns and polling companies are exempt from the bulk of regulations put in place to combat scammers.

“The campaign stuff is just never going to go away,” Sholes predicted, as members of Congress and their campaigns tend to benefit from mass communication services and carve out political exemptions in anti-spam laws to protect those conduits.

He said that the FCC’s rules only apply to groups using robocalling and robotexting tools since marketers are generally allowed to call or text consumers without consent as long as their phone numbers are manually dialed.

According to Reuters, the FCC’s changes may very well “double or triple” the number of lawsuits brought against spammers flouting the law.