The Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force, made up of 51 attorneys general, this week sent warnings to nine companies they say may be violating state and federal laws by routing “allegedly unlawful robocalls” across their networks, officials from the task force announced today.
According to Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, these calls include people impersonating governments and businesses with the intent to get money and/or personal information, and the companies that are being warned are acting as the middleman.
“Robocalls are more than just a nuisance,” Tong said in a prepared release. “They facilitate fraud with the potential to inflict serious financial harm. If you receive a suspicious call, hang up, do not engage, and report it.”
According to the warning letters, copies of which are available for public review, these companies could be subject to damages, civil penalties, and injunctions and are advised by the attorneys general to stop transmitting these calls.
The Task Force — which formed in 2022 — receives and reviews information through various industry and law enforcement sources. If it finds any company “is involved in the transmission of calls associated with high-volume illegal and/or suspicious robocall campaigns. The Task Force will then issue a warning notice to caution companies that their actions may violate state and federal consumer protection and telemarketing laws,” according to its website.
Among those sources is USTelecom’s Industry Traceback Group (ITG), according to the letters. As a way to mitigate and stop robocalls, providers receive a “traceback notice” when a call is suspected to be illegal, according to ITG.
“With billions of calls traversing the networks of hundreds of interconnected companies, providers historically had limited insight into exactly what role they played, and to what extent, in the illegal robocalling problem — and in turn, what actions they could take to address it,” according to an ITG report. “The ITG’s centralized traceback process itself has changed that. Upon receipt of a traceback notice, a provider now has information it can act on: the provider learns about the illegal robocalls flowing through its network and can engage with the provider or customer providing that problematic traffic. In turn, providers have built processes and practices based on this new information.”
As an example, one of the companies cited this week by the task force, RSCom, received almost 1,000 traceback notices since 2019 for scam calls about tax relief, private entity imposters, utilities disconnects, travel scams, and student loan forgiveness, according to the warning letter the task force sent.
Tong encouraged anyone who has received such robocalls to report them to through a website — ct.gov/agcomplaints.
Various federal law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have also been notified of the task force’s research and concerns.
Including this latest batch of letters, a total of 23 letters have been issued by the task force since its inception.
The companies who received notices include: Global Net Holdings, All Access Telecom,Lingo Telecom, NGL Communications, Range, RSCom Ltd., Telcast Network, ThinQ Technologies, and Telcentris.