We've all gotten those calls. They always seem to come from out of state and if you do manage to pick it's usually a fake person on the other end trying to get your social security number.
In June, the Federal Communications Commission ruled that carriers could block robocalls for their customers by default — without requiring the customers opt in first. Well, now it seems AT&T is sick of it as well as they have announced they will be blocking Robocalls and following through on the ruling. They will be enabling their Call Protect Service by default with new and existing lines.
According to TheVerge.com, "AT&T’s Call Protect service does three things: it detects and blocks fraudulent calls entirely, flags telemarketers and spam calls as “Suspected Spam” when the phone rings, and allows you to maintain a personal block list to specifically block individual numbers." They also went on to say, "The service has been around (and available for free) for postpaid AT&T customers for a while now, but the catch has been that you’d have to download an app and actively enable it on your account. Thanks to the new FCC’s ruling, AT&T can activate it for you, although you can still manually activate it if you already have AT&T and don’t want to wait. For those who’d rather receive all of their calls, unfiltered, AT&T will still allow users to opt out of Call Protect like before; it’s only the default behavior that’s changing."
All in all, it's going to be nice blocking those spammers. Hopefully the other companies follow!