ABA Joint Trades Ex Parte Letter re: Meeting with Comm’r Simington’s Staff re: Illegal Texts and Calls

Dear Ms. Dortch,

On October 23, 2024, Paul Benda and Jonathan Thessin of the American Bankers Association (ABA); James Akin of America’s Credit Unions; Brian Allen, Madison Stulga, and Greg Williamson of the Bank Policy Institute; Aryeh Fishman of the Edison Electric Institute; and Alisha Sears of the Mortgage Bankers Association (collectively, the Associations), met with Michael Sweeney, Policy Advisor for Commissioner Nathan Simington.1

The Associations attending the meeting represent banks, credit unions, and electric utility companies. The Associations are united in their commitment to combating criminals who attempt to defraud consumers by impersonating legitimate businesses through illegally spoofed text messages and calls. In the meeting, the Organizations affirmed their support for the draft Report and Order released on September 5, 2024 (Order), which includes provisions to combat illegal texts and calls.2 The Associations urged the Federal Communications Commission (Commission) to adopt the Order without delay.

In the meeting, the Associations described how texts that impersonate legitimate businesses harm consumers and undermine those businesses’ ability to communicate with their customers. Mr. Benda with ABA described how a community bank located in the Midwest with less than $500 million in assets was the target of a mass texting campaign last month. A criminal sent a fake fraud alert to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of the bank’s customers (most likely, through an “email-to-text” campaign). If the customer replied to the fraud alert, the criminal called the customer, displaying the bank’s phone number on the customer’s Caller ID (i.e., an illegally spoofed call) and claiming to be from the bank. The criminal then used social engineering (i.e., publicly available information about the customer) to persuade the customer to reveal their

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