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Man Accused of Making Millions of Robocalls Faces Biggest-Ever FCC Fine

duskwuff 9y ago
Good. I was getting a couple of calls a day from this campaign for a while. It was pretty easy to recognize -- but it was still pretty annoying. Multiply that by a few million, and the amount of time wasted must be immense.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  I have a very long email thread of voicemail transcripts from this. Very annoying.
Waterluvian 9y ago
If you "overwhelm an emergency paging service", I feel like it should become a criminal matter beyond just wire fraud.
mariuolo 9y ago
Will they be able to pay $120M? And will there be also personal sanctions for the individuals responsible for this?
- dqv 9y ago
  >Will they be able to pay $120M? No. It doesn't cost that much money to make millions of robocalls. 100 phone lines * 60 minutes (1 minute recording length) * 14 hours of spamming per day * 365 days of the year ~30,000,000 calls a year The cost of doing this is less than $5,000/month for the phone lines. >And will there be also personal sanctions for the individuals responsible for this? The law always confuses me on this, so I can only go into what is theoretical. Two concepts come up: vicarious liability and piercing the corporate veil. Vicarious liability is when one entity is responsible for another entity's actions. Usually the concept applies with CompanyX contracting SpamConduitY. CompanyX says "no! We didn't make the calls, SpamConduitY did!" Vicarious liability holds the party who requested the performance of the calls accountable so that CompanyX can't just blame it all on SpamConduitY. Theoretically, the same could apply to Spam Man. The FCC or a litigant could argue Spam Man is vicariously liable for the actions of SpamConduitX. It's certainly possible that Spam Man's company SpamConduitX only had one employee: Spam Man. If that's the case, there is always a possibility of a determination that SpamConduitX is just an "alter ego" of Spam Man. Piercing the veil is said to be a rare event.
- vabmit 9y ago
  The most recent information visible in search about this guy's company shows he was making a little over $20,000/year. A recent traffic related arrest of someone with the same name as his in the same area where he is reported to live shows a residence in a cheap beach condo high rise in a low cost part of southern Florida. All that misery he put out into the world and he probably only made around $20K/yr (probably from mentally vulnerable/disabled populations). Have any of you ever actually purchased a cruise vacation from a robo-caller that spammed you in the middle of the night?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
NewCoke 9y ago
Please ELI5: What is the tech behind this? How is he able to do this?
- bkmartin 9y ago
  I really hope that the investigation gets to the tech and allows the phone companies to actually shut this stuff down. I get calls every day from robocallers on my cell phone. Every now and then I get a real person on the line and can usually get them to swear at me when I give them a hard time for trying to scam people. Part of me feels bad because they probably don't know any better, but seriously? How can you not know? How many pissed off people do they talk to everyday because of this... Deceitful practices like this are exhausting and the politicians seem to not care at all.
  - cosmie 9y ago
    There's not really any special sauce in the tech. I scanned the FCC Order and didn't see a reference to a particular autodialer, but there are dozens to choose from. If his service was purely playing an automated IVR message and the live call center he hot-transferred to was someone else, I could see him making a custom solution to cut costs. But it'd be fairly easy to make that volume of calls via most enterprise level autodialers without raising any eyebrows as long as there were enough agent licenses to support it. Most autodialers bake in regulatory compliance functionality and warnings, but the laws that apply are so specific to an individual user that those features can be disabled or overridden and they leave it up to the client to understand what laws their calling must adhere to. For example, the guy in question would have been legally fine to spam 100mm calls in three months if they had been business landlines, as the federal law they're leveraging for their fine only applies "to emergency phone lines, wireless phones, or residential telephone lines"[1] [1]In the first paragraph of the order: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0622/DA-17-593A1.pdf http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...
  - dqv 9y ago
    >allows the phone companies to actually shut this stuff down :) I hate to break it to you, but phone companies aren't really all that interested in shutting anything down. It's a multi-faceted problem. There isn't a good (agreed upon) way to authenticate calls. Even if that were the case, phone companies are not going to be jumping on the idea of retrofitting the old parts of the network with reverse proxies for this new authenticator.

Good. I was getting a couple of calls a day from this campaign for a while. It was pretty easy to recognize -- but it was still pretty annoying. Multiply that by a few million, and the amount of time wasted must be immense.

ReverseCold 9y ago
I have a very long email thread of voicemail transcripts from this. Very annoying.

Waterluvian 9y ago

If you "overwhelm an emergency paging service", I feel like it should become a criminal matter beyond just wire fraud.

mariuolo 9y ago

Will they be able to pay $120M? And will there be also personal sanctions for the individuals responsible for this?

dqv 9y ago
>Will they be able to pay $120M? No. It doesn't cost that much money to make millions of robocalls. 100 phone lines * 60 minutes (1 minute recording length) * 14 hours of spamming per day * 365 days of the year ~30,000,000 calls a year The cost of doing this is less than $5,000/month for the phone lines. >And will there be also personal sanctions for the individuals responsible for this? The law always confuses me on this, so I can only go into what is theoretical. Two concepts come up: vicarious liability and piercing the corporate veil. Vicarious liability is when one entity is responsible for another entity's actions. Usually the concept applies with CompanyX contracting SpamConduitY. CompanyX says "no! We didn't make the calls, SpamConduitY did!" Vicarious liability holds the party who requested the performance of the calls accountable so that CompanyX can't just blame it all on SpamConduitY. Theoretically, the same could apply to Spam Man. The FCC or a litigant could argue Spam Man is vicariously liable for the actions of SpamConduitX. It's certainly possible that Spam Man's company SpamConduitX only had one employee: Spam Man. If that's the case, there is always a possibility of a determination that SpamConduitX is just an "alter ego" of Spam Man. Piercing the veil is said to be a rare event.
vabmit 9y ago
The most recent information visible in search about this guy's company shows he was making a little over $20,000/year. A recent traffic related arrest of someone with the same name as his in the same area where he is reported to live shows a residence in a cheap beach condo high rise in a low cost part of southern Florida. All that misery he put out into the world and he probably only made around $20K/yr (probably from mentally vulnerable/disabled populations). Have any of you ever actually purchased a cruise vacation from a robo-caller that spammed you in the middle of the night?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

NewCoke 9y ago

Please ELI5: What is the tech behind this? How is he able to do this?

bkmartin 9y ago
I really hope that the investigation gets to the tech and allows the phone companies to actually shut this stuff down. I get calls every day from robocallers on my cell phone. Every now and then I get a real person on the line and can usually get them to swear at me when I give them a hard time for trying to scam people. Part of me feels bad because they probably don't know any better, but seriously? How can you not know? How many pissed off people do they talk to everyday because of this... Deceitful practices like this are exhausting and the politicians seem to not care at all.
- cosmie 9y ago
  There's not really any special sauce in the tech. I scanned the FCC Order and didn't see a reference to a particular autodialer, but there are dozens to choose from. If his service was purely playing an automated IVR message and the live call center he hot-transferred to was someone else, I could see him making a custom solution to cut costs. But it'd be fairly easy to make that volume of calls via most enterprise level autodialers without raising any eyebrows as long as there were enough agent licenses to support it. Most autodialers bake in regulatory compliance functionality and warnings, but the laws that apply are so specific to an individual user that those features can be disabled or overridden and they leave it up to the client to understand what laws their calling must adhere to. For example, the guy in question would have been legally fine to spam 100mm calls in three months if they had been business landlines, as the federal law they're leveraging for their fine only applies "to emergency phone lines, wireless phones, or residential telephone lines"[1] [1]In the first paragraph of the order: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0622/DA-17-593A1.pdf http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...
- dqv 9y ago
  >allows the phone companies to actually shut this stuff down :) I hate to break it to you, but phone companies aren't really all that interested in shutting anything down. It's a multi-faceted problem. There isn't a good (agreed upon) way to authenticate calls. Even if that were the case, phone companies are not going to be jumping on the idea of retrofitting the old parts of the network with reverse proxies for this new authenticator.