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Fighting Fraud: AT&T’s Commitment to Protecting Americans
Strengthening security practices
Fighting Fraud: AT&T’s Commitment to Protecting Americans
July 20, 2026
July 20, 2026
Key insights
Every day, millions of Americans receive a text, call, or email from an individual pretending to be someone they trust, only to find out they were targets of fraud. Last year alone, 15 million adults in the U.S. were victims of financial scams, amounting to nearly $68 billion in stolen money.
Screening a call or blocking an unknown contact is a common nuisance, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. Victims of scams are forced to reckon with harms to their finances, privacy, and well-being. Nearly three-quarters of adults who experienced a scam in their household reported negative effects on their mental health. We don’t want ourselves or our loved ones to be in that position.
As a connectivity provider, we’ve launched a full-fledged effort to protect Americans against fraud by making their connections as reliable as possible and giving them the tools they need to stay vigilant – and that begins with learning about these threats and their common forms.
Fraud Is Evolving: Here’s What to Look For
Phone calls and text messages allow us to communicate across the country and around the world, while new AI tools are improving our lives every day. We mostly think about how these innovations make our lives better. However, the reality is those same capabilities are available to bad actors looking to cause real harm. Now more than ever, it is important that we understand these risks. Here’s what we should all look out for:
- Smishing and fake toll texts: You may receive an urgent message claiming you owe a small outstanding balance, with a link to a convincing fake website designed to steal credit card and personal information.
- Scam robocalls and spoofing: Fraudsters may use auto-dialers or automated or recorded voices to place fraudulent robocalls. They may use caller ID spoofing to make a phone call appear to come from a trusted number.
- Vishing: Scammers use AI-generated voice cloning to pose as your friend or relative and attempt to steal your data or money.
- SIM swap and port-out fraud: Fraudsters try to take over your phone number by transferring it to a SIM in a device they control.
- Account takeover: Through phishing, deceptive calls, or manipulation, fraudsters try to gain unauthorized access to accounts to add lines, change billing, or steal your personal information.
- Subscription fraud: Fraudsters try to use stolen or synthetic identities to open accounts, obtain devices, and disappear, leaving you to deal with the consequences.
- Social engineering schemes: Fraudsters try to contact customers with promises of “special deals,” requesting their credentials or One Time PINs.
These are just a few ways that bad actors are scamming victims across numerous devices, products, and services. The threat is real. That is why collaborative efforts across industries, government, and consumers are essential to winning the fight.
Partnering Across the Industry to Step Up Our Fight
When it comes to protecting consumers, telecommunications companies are on the same team. That collaboration pays off. By coming together to build industry standards and practices, we’ve had tremendous success connecting consumers more securely. We also engage in cross-industry partnerships to mitigate fraud.
- In a single year, wireless providers collectively blocked more than 55 billion spam and scam texts, and AT&T now blocks or labels more than 3 billion robocalls per month.
That’s not all. We co-chaired the standards group that developed the industry standard caller ID authentication framework. Beyond that, we remain committed to industry-wide initiatives that make those protections possible.
- The Secure Messaging Initiative, managed by CTIA – The Wireless Association, gathers industry and experts to craft guidance that helps wireless carriers, state, and federal law enforcement share intelligence on suspected spam.
- CTIA’s messaging principles and best practices are available as a resource for non-consumer senders, offering advice like requiring consent and honoring opt-out requests.
- The Industry Traceback Group, established by USTelecom, has gathered telecom companies to create consistent, industry-wide guidance for tracing illegal calls across provider networks worldwide back to their origin.
- The Secure Telephone Identity Governance Authority (STI-GA) brings together representatives from major telecom companies and associations to establish the policy framework for STIR/SHAKEN caller authentication.
- Communications Fraud Control Association is the leading global organization dedicated to fraud risk management, fraud prevention, and profitability protection within the communications ecosystem.
The work we do to filter out spam and fraud before it gets to consumers is critical, but in today’s digital world, we also need to equip customers with the resources they need to protect themselves.
We Are Empowering Consumers
Along with continued work with our partners to fight fraud at its origin, empowering consumers is key. We have developed a series of critical protections our customers can use to keep their identities and data secure.
- AT&T ActiveArmor is a free app that allows customers to customize their robocall protection, manage unwanted calls, and create their own block list for calls labeled spam likely by our network analytics. A paid advanced version also includes public Wi-Fi protection, identity monitoring, and safe browsing.
- Wireless Account Lock is a free feature for those who want extra protection from unauthorized changes to their wireless accounts. It disables several key account changes including billing updates or wireless number transfers. You can lock and unlock it at any time.
- AT&T Call Protect is a free service for customers of AT&T Phone and AT&T Phone – Advanced that blocks calls from known scammers and sends a caller ID alert if a call is suspected of spam.
For nearly a decade, AT&T has invested in advanced data science, AI, and real-time behavioral analytics to help protect customers from fraud, unauthorized transactions, and account compromise. Today, these capabilities are embedded directly into how we sell, service, and safeguard accounts across our channels.
- By evaluating risk in milliseconds before a transaction is completed, AI helps identify suspicious activity more accurately, enabling legitimate customers to move forward seamlessly while ensuring higher-risk transactions receive the right level of protection. Most customers never notice these safeguards—and that’s by design. The best fraud prevention happens quietly in the background.
We also recognize that education and awareness are the first lines of defense.
- AT&T Cyber Aware provides plain-language guidance on current scams, fraud alerts, and instructions for reporting suspicious activity.
- AT&T ScreenReady® offers free digital literacy resources for families, seniors, and newly connected users, developed in partnership with the Public Library Association, National PTA, and American Academy of Pediatrics.
- We also remind customers to stay vigilant. Never share personal credentials or account information with someone you don’t know, and remember – AT&T will never call and ask for a one-time security PIN.
Fraud is constantly evolving, but we are not shying away from this fight. To assist in these efforts, policymakers can act to criminalize unauthorized SIM boxes and to provide safe harbors for greater collaboration within the messaging stakeholder ecosystem, including law enforcement.
From customer education to developing cutting-edge anti-fraud tools to working together with other invested parties, we are working hard to put an end to fraud and scams. For years, we have been confronting this issue head-on, and we are not stopping now.
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