The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week released a plan to fight the rising numbers of robocalls that Americans are receiving across the country, with many of these calls considered scams.

"The American people are fed up with receiving robocalls," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai told reporters Wednesday. "And we believe we need to make it easier for phone companies to block these phone calls."

Unwanted calls are the FCC's top complaint coming from citizens.

The FCC is urging major phone companies such as Sprint and Verizon to begin implementing an authentication technology called STIR/SHAKEN which can be used to block unwanted calls.

The FCC will vote on the proposal on June 6.

Many of these robocalls are scams and are designed to lure people into calling back and giving out financial information such as their credit card numbers. The robocalls use "spoofing," a technique that gives the robocall a phone number with a local area code. This is because the scammer recognizes that the victim is more likely to pick up a phone call with a number in their area code.

Call-blocking company YouMail claims that there were 4.9 billion robocalls initiated in April 2019.

CNN reported in April that "spoofing" could even allow a robocall to imitate human voices and steal real people's photos that would show on the victim's caller ID.

The FCC's approach under Pai to deal with robocalls has been lambasted by the media in the past for not doing enough. In March, the HBO program"Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" did a 17-minute segment on robocalls and blamed Pai for failing to enact strict rules to combat the phenomenon.

The program criticized the FCC under Pai for turning over Obama administration anti-robocall rules and also claimed that Pai might bow to pressure from telemarketers and banks to make it harder for individuals to sue robocallers.

Pai, who was appointed by President Trump in January 2017, has been criticized for attempting to repeal Obama-era net neutrality rule.

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