US regulators fine robocaller $120 mn
23 Jun 2017
US Federal regulators yesterday said they had identified the perpetrator of one of the largest illegal robocalling campaigns they had ever investigated.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has proposed a $120-million fine for a Miami resident who was allegedly responsible for almost 97 million robocalls single-handedly over just the last three months of 2016.
According to officials, Adrian Abramovich auto-dialed hundreds of millions of phone calls to landlines and cellphones in the US and Canada and at one point even overwhelmed an emergency medical paging service.
Making prerecorded telemarketing phone calls to people without first getting their consent is prohibited and so is making telemarketing calls to emergency phone lines and deliberately falsifying caller ID to disguise identity with the intent to harm or defraud consumers.
According to the FCC, the robocalls made by Abramovich through his ambiguously named companies (Marketing Strategy Leaders or Marketing Leaders) would show up "spoofed" as if they came from a phone number with the same area code and the same first three digits of the recipient's number.
If the recipients answered they got a recording offering an "exclusive" vacation deal from prominent travel companies such as Expedia, Marriott, Hilton or TripAdvisor - instructing them to "Press 1" to learn more. However, when they pressed 1 they would land on a line with a call centre hawking "discounted" vacation packages and time-shares not affiliated with any of those brands.
In reality, the travel agencies that robocall recipients were directed to "were fronts for one or more Mexican-based call centres engaged in selling timeshares and vacation packages to various timeshare facilities," the FCC said. The FCC added that these agencies contracted with Abramovich to receive calls generated by his robocall operation and paid him daily for various amounts of phone calls.
The FCC launched an investigation after TripAdvisor notified the commission of the scheme last year.
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