US goes on the offensive against phone spammers
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Attorneys at 49 US states filed a joint lawsuit against Avid Telecom, which is accused of organizing mass automated calls throughout the country. This lawsuit is one of the largest initiatives in the US, where for several years there has been a fight against telephone spam both at the state level and at the level of private business.
The lawsuit on behalf of the prosecutors of 49 states was yesterday filed in the District Court of Phoenix, Arizona. It says that Michael D. Lansky, LLC, a private company registered in the state of Arizona and operating under the name Avid Telecom, made 24.5 billion automated telephone calls (robocalls) in the United States from December 2018 to January 2023.
The plaintiffs allege that the company actively used telephone numbers obtained illegally with the help of the so-called. spoofing, as well as stolen from closed bases of state organizations and private companies. There were also about 7.5 billion calls made to phones whose owners entered their numbers in a special federal registry against automatic dialing (Do Not Call Registry).
The lawsuit alleges that Avid Telecom is a VoIP (Voice over Internet) service provider that sells and buys user data, phone numbers, calling software and robocall consulting.
It is noted that spam calls were made as part of massive health insurance scams, social security scams, Amazon scams, credit card scams, etc.
“Americans are sick and tired of their phones ringing with scam calls,” said New York State Attorney Letitia James. “Rob calls are not only annoying and undesirable. They cheat millions of consumers out of tens of billions of dollars every year. Avid Telecom repeatedly pointed out the inadmissibility of such actions, but she refused to stop them, ”added District of Columbia Attorney Brian Schwalb.
The class action lawsuit by US states against one of the largest spam callers in the country is one of the largest initiatives in a multi-year fight US authorities and private business are against this phenomenon. Back in 1991, the Consumer Telephone Protection Act was passed, which prohibits telephone marketing using auto-dialing unless the user has given prior consent to it. In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a national register of telephone subscribers who do not want commercial entities to call them with promotional offers.
But as Internet VoIP services evolved, spam calls continued to rise. According to YouMail, for every American there are 15 such calls per month. If in 2017 their number was 30.5 billion, then in 2018 – already 47.8 billion. Against this background, in 2019 the leading telephone operator AT & T announced about the launch of the country’s first system to combat auto-dialing, which will combine the efforts of two operators at once – AT & T itself and Comcast.
Reduce spam call activity It was observed during a pandemic: data specialized company YouMail, in April, 2.9 billion such calls were made in the United States, while in March – 4.1 billion, and in February – 4.8 billion. The average daily number of spam calls in the United States decreased from 166 million in February to 132 million in March and 97 million in April.
Experts explain the decrease in the activity of telephone spammers by almost a third by the fact that many call centers, both in the United States and abroad, have closed due to restrictive measures to combat coronavirus.
This apparently showed the authorities that phone spammers are not so immune. For example, last Monday the US Federal Telecommunications Commission (FCC) closed another company that was caught in the organization of mass unauthorized spam calls. Back in December FCC took out Urth Access warning not to run a mass automated call advertising one of the education loan scams. However, according to the FCC, the company did not heed the warnings and continued to make millions of robocalls. As a result, the regulator took measures to terminate its activities.
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