Do you dread phone calls from unknown phone numbers that seem legitimate? Is it someone you need to speak with or another telemarketing call that might be an outright scam?

A piece of legislation that became law this week might help with that.

Passed in a flurry of bill trade-offs between the Pennsylvania House and Senate as part of the overall budget negotiation this month, the measure:

Further restricts the hours solicitors can call.Prohibits them from faking their phone numbers.Re-defines who does and doesn’t have to register as a telemarketer with the state attorney general.Gov. Josh Shapiro signed the bill into law Monday, and its provisions go into effect in 90 days.

The growing frequency of robocalls “are especially burdensome to senior citizens,” wrote Sen. Michelle Brooks, R-Mercer County, the bill’s author, in a sponsorship memo.

“When the phone numbers are spoofed to appear to be from the local area, a senior citizen may believe the call to be from a family member or a neighbor contacting them about an emergency, especially when these calls are made later in the evening,” Brooks continued. “Instead, the individual is met with a computerized telemarketing message.”

As always, the new rules are most likely to be followed by legitimate telemarketers — but less so by scammers who are already intent on breaking the law. But the measure does give law enforcement an additional way to go after illicit callers.

“Caller ID spoofing and robocalls are not just an annoyance — they are tools criminals use to steal from seniors and other vulnerable Pennsylvanians,” Attorney General Dave Sunday wrote in a recent bill analysis. “This legislation gives us another important tool to crack down on these scams and better protect consumers across the commonwealth.”

The new law updates Pennsylvania’s existing statute on telemarketing and solicitations. As Sunday noted, that includes adding a prohibition on any action to “falsely identify the telemarketer’s name or telephone number.”

It bans “spoofing,” in which a scammer dupes a phone system into falsely showing that their call is coming from a different number, typically a local number and/or one associated with an institution the victim knows and trusts.

The legislation bars any telephone solicitations on Sunday, and restricts their hours to 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. the other days of the week.

It also rewrites the section of the existing law requiring telemarketers to register with the attorney general, although many exemptions — including for nonprofits, hospitals and businesses with storefronts in the state — will continue to apply.

Americans receive a staggering number of automated phone calls, about 2.6 billion per month as of 2025, according to a study from the Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

That comes despite the FCC shutting down 1,400 robocall systems last year alone. As PIRG notes, however, fewer than half of phone companies have fully installed robocall-fighting software as required by federal solicitation law.

While many of those robocallers may be selling legitimate products or services, the portion that are believed to be scams are also rising.

A Pew survey last year found that 31% of Americans report receiving a suspected scam call at least once per day, with 68% saying they get one at least once per week. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed said they had experienced an actual scam at some point, with scammers typically attempting to steal credit card numbers, social media logins and personal identifiers such as Social Security numbers.

The spoofing or concealing of phone numbers plays a significant role. Scams involving the impersonation of a legitimate bank skyrocketed 150% between 2024 and 2025, according to a survey from the Bank Policy Institute (BPI), which conducts research on behalf of the banking industry.

Two of the banks in the study found that 40% of the calls that appeared to originate with their banks’ phone numbers were actually being spoofed by scam groups, BPI found.

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