New DO NOT Call Act Adds Prison Time, $20K Fines for Illegal Robocalls and Spam Texts

When you’re juggling work, family, and that ever-growing to-do list, the last thing you need is a spam call about your car’s extended warranty. The Deter Obnoxious, Nefarious, and Outrageous Telephone Calls Act of 2025, or the DO NOT Call Act, is here to make life much harder for the people behind those calls and texts.

This bill takes the existing Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA)—the law that makes those robocalls illegal in the first place—and gives it some serious teeth. Specifically, it introduces criminal penalties for the first time, meaning that willfully and knowingly violating the TCPA can now land someone up to one year in prison, a fine, or both (Section 2, subsection (k)). This shifts the enforcement game from just civil lawsuits and fines to actual criminal prosecution, which is a massive jump in deterrence.

The Cost of Spoofing Just Doubled

One of the most annoying tricks robocallers use is “spoofing”—making it look like your neighbor or a local business is calling you when it’s actually some scammer halfway across the globe. The DO NOT Call Act targets this directly by doubling the civil fines for providing inaccurate caller ID information. Currently, the fine is $10,000 per violation; this bill bumps it up to $20,000 per violation (Section 2, amending Section 227(e)(5)). For the high-volume operations that rely on fake caller IDs to trick people into picking up, this makes the risk of getting caught a lot more expensive.

When Robocalling Becomes a Felony

While a year in prison might be enough to scare away most bad actors, the bill sets up aggravated criminal offenses for the real heavy hitters. If the offense is tied to a felony, causes a total loss of $5,000 or more to victims in a year, or involves truly astronomical call volumes, the penalty jumps to up to three years in prison (Section 2, subsection (k)). We’re talking about the worst offenders here, defined by specific thresholds like initiating over 100,000 calls in a 24-hour period or 10 million calls in a year. This is clearly aimed at dismantling large, organized scam operations, not accidentally calling the wrong number.

Texts Are Calls, Too

For anyone thinking they can just switch from automated calls to automated texts, the bill closes that loophole. The definition of a “call” for the purpose of these new criminal penalties is broad, covering any message or communication sent to a North American Numbering Plan number. Crucially, this explicitly includes text messages sent to a mobile phone using an automatic dialing system without the recipient’s prior consent (Section 2, Definitions). If you’ve ever gotten a barrage of spam texts from an unknown number, this provision means those senders are now facing the same stiff penalties as the robocallers.

The Real-World Impact

What does this mean for the average person? It means law enforcement now has a powerful new tool—prison time—to go after the people who are constantly interrupting your day and trying to steal your money. For the legitimate business that uses automated calling for things like appointment reminders, the standard remains the same: you need consent. But for the massive, illegal call centers that drive everyone crazy, the risk profile has changed completely. The focus is on willful and knowing violations, which is a high bar that protects honest companies while targeting the scam artists. Essentially, the bill aims to make the juice not worth the squeeze for illegal telemarketers, offering a much-needed break from the constant assault of spam calls and texts.