In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission, CFA and other public interest groups applaud the FCC for pursuing a rulemaking to ease the problem of “slamming,” in which a customer’s long-distance carrier is changed without his or her knowledge, as well as the problem of “cramming”—when a third party enters unauthorized charges into a consumer’s phone bill. Though the FCC has examined cramming and slamming several times over the last ten years, and has extended important protections to consumers, regulatory gaps persist. For example, most cramming and slamming consumer protections extend only to consumers with traditional landline phones—an increasingly smaller portion of the population. Because cramming and slamming continue to plague consumers, we urge the FCC to take a comprehensive approach to these problems, and extend the strongest possible protections against these types of fraud to all voice customers—whether they use a traditional landline, Voice over IP (VoIP) service, or a pre- or post-paid cell phone.
