FTC Fines Four Operations Responsible For Billions of Illegal Robocalls (cnet.com) 106
Four companies that made billions of illegal robocalls have been caught and fined. From a report: The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday said the agency reached settlements with four operations responsible for billions of illegal robocalls pitching debt-relief services, home security systems, fake charities, auto warranties and Google search results services. The companies were charged with violating the FTC Act, as well as the agency's Telemarketing Sales Rule and its Do Not Call provisions.
"We have brought dozens of cases targeting illegal robocalls, and fighting unwanted calls remains one of our highest priorities," said Andrew Smith, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC, in a release. "We also have great advice on call-blocking services and how to reduce unwanted calls at [our website.]" The settlements come as the agency focuses on combating illegal robocalls. The four companies, NetDotSolutions, Higher Goals Marketing, Veterans of America and Pointbreak Media, are banned by court orders from robocalling and most telemarketing activities, according to the FTC's release. Further reading: FTC Tells ISPs To Disclose Exactly What Information They Collect On Users and What It's For.
"We have brought dozens of cases targeting illegal robocalls, and fighting unwanted calls remains one of our highest priorities," said Andrew Smith, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC, in a release. "We also have great advice on call-blocking services and how to reduce unwanted calls at [our website.]" The settlements come as the agency focuses on combating illegal robocalls. The four companies, NetDotSolutions, Higher Goals Marketing, Veterans of America and Pointbreak Media, are banned by court orders from robocalling and most telemarketing activities, according to the FTC's release. Further reading: FTC Tells ISPs To Disclose Exactly What Information They Collect On Users and What It's For.
Fines (Score:3)
That'll stop 'em!
Re:Fines (Score:5, Funny)
My favorite is Small Penalties by Alastair Mayer.
The helicopter cruised over the tundra at five hundred feet. In the passenger compartment, Agent Steve Grant gazed out the window. His prisoner, Samuel "Spam Lord" Walford, sat manacled to the aluminum seat frame across from him. The pilot's warning sounded in his headset.
"Ten more minutes!" Grant relayed to Walford, shouting over the noise of the chopper.
"This is cruel and unusual punishment!"
"Come on, Walford, your lawyers tried that. The Supreme Court upheld the sentence. You're getting off easy. Five days in exile and you're a free man." Grant shouted to be heard; it took the sarcastic edge off his voice.
"Yeah, if I survive. It's not fair. I didn't hurt anyone, just sent a few emails."
"You were convicted of almost thirty million separate counts of sending unsolicited commercial email. That was for just one day. That's not 'a few'."
"James Atkins sent a hundred million a day. So did Koralev. I didn't do so much."
"Koralev got fined thirty seven million dollars . . . under the old laws. Thirty million is just what your prosecutors went with." Grant looked out the window. The ground below was green with new spring growth, scattered with shallow pools of snowmelt. He turned back to the Spam Lord. "If I had a nickel for every thousand spams you sent during your 'career', I'd be a millionaire. Oh wait, you do and you are. Or were. That's billions of emails."
"Email never hurt anybody. Don't want it? Just delete it. Two seconds."
"You stole their time. You stole everyone's time. Two seconds per spam email? That's a lifetime per billion emails. How many lifetimes did you destroy? It's like murder."
"So you're going to leave me to die."
"No single thing out there will kill you. You can hike out in three or four days at a good pace. Plenty of daylight this time of year."
"What about polar bears?"
"The coast is two hundred miles away. They don't come this far inland."
"There's wolves."
"There's a paintball gun in your pack"
"Paintball! What the hell? How about a real gun?"
"Not for a criminal. The pellets are skunk juice. Hit a wolf and, between the sting and the smell, it'll back off."
"Huh. What about bug repellent?"
"A few bugs never hurt anybody. Just brush them off. Two seconds." Grant grinned, showing teeth to make it a snarl. Walford glared at him.
For a few minutes they just watched the terrain out the window, feeling the vibration of the helicopter. Grant broke the silence. "What makes it worse is that spam is so stupid. Like my wife needs twenty emails a day for penis enlargement."
Walford sneered. "Married to you? Maybe she does."
Grant forced down a surge of anger. He'd been transferring prisoners for too long to let insults get to him. There were more subtle responses than physical violence. "You're kind of lucky. The peak of mosquito season has about passed. Their bite is like a hypodermic stick."
Walford's sneer faded. "But that's passed?"
"Only the peak, there are still plenty around. Plenty of black flies too. They bite a chunk out of your skin, but they inject you with an anesthetic first so you don't notice it." Walford seemed to relax a bit. "You're shitting me, right?"
"Nope. Ask anyone who's been up here." Grant paused, then grinned his feral grin. "There's more. That anesthetic is a nerve poison. It wears off, but if you get a few hundred bites in an hour, you'll feel it. You'll get confused, disoriented. Maybe want to puke. If you keep getting bitten, well. . .
"But that's a lot of bites, right? I mean, how many black flies can there be up here?"
Grant leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Le
MOD UP (Score:2)
Great story, enjoyed reading.
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This is true of most Trump appointments. Department of Education -- take money from poor public schools and give it to rich kid schools.
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Fines, meh.
%s/fines/heads on pikes/g
There fixed that for them.
Re:TC Fines Four Operations Responsible... (Score:4, Interesting)
According to the article, it varied from $500k-$3m.
Depending on the size of the company, that could range from a slap on the wrist to bankruptcy.
Maybe we need to report fines in relation to gross revenue or net operating income...
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Since they don't tell us the two mid-range amounts, all we know for sure is that the total fines were between $4.5M and 9.5M for "billions" of calls. "Billions" is probably at least 2 billion, and likely more, so the fine per call was probably substantially less than $9.5M/2B =~ $0.005/call.
Meanwhile, a quick search suggests the going rate for legitimate robocall-selling companies is between about $0.06 and $0.02/call depending on volume.
So, at the extreme high end, the fines *maybe* amount to about( $0.00
Uh.... "billions"? (Score:2)
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How can anyone read that and not think it is hyperbole?
How can anyone with a phone not think billions is quite believable?
a phone in the *USA* though. (Score:1)
Robocalls are literally unkown in Germany. For one simple reason:
It is illegal to call a private person as a business, if you did not have business with that person before (and that person did not agree to using the number for marketing reasons, since the data protection laws).
It's literally that simple.
Businesses don't get robocalls because the sums of money their deals are about justify a real sales droid calling. And they will first have to get through the normal receptionist people and the like.
But what
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It is ALSO illegal to do so in the US. But amazingly these companies choose to break the law because, for years, they were able to get away with it. Because of the design of the core infrastructure of VOIP and our telephone system, the call originators were able to spoof the source of the calls, and typically sourced them from a jurisdiction in which the US agencies have trouble investigating and/or prosecuting.
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For your mobile, use Call Blocker by Vlad Lee. For your landline use nomorobo.com .
I have no association with either beyond being a happy user.
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Robocalls are literally unkown in Germany. For one simple reason: ...
It is illegal to call a private person as a business,
That is not the [main] reason. The reason is that when you call somebody in Germany, *you* pay for the call. In USA, you pay for the cost of call in your network and the receiver pays for the routing in his network. And callers have very cheap arrangements in their originating networks. ;-)
It is also much more difficult in Germany and other civilized countries to spoof a phone number. In USA telecos claim that they can't prevent spoofing. It is interesting that Deutsche Telekom has no problem with that
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Uhh... with math?
There's 300 million cell phones in the US (roughly) plus a bunch of land lines but let's forget about the land lines entirely.
You only need 3.3 calls per line to hit 1 billion. Given that I've gotten 3 robo calls just TODAY on my line it's not hard to see how you'd get to "billions" really quick. Hell let's say 200 million of those phones aren't on robocall lists. Now you only need 10 calls per lines to round up to 1 billion.
So, yeah
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>"There's 300 million cell phones in the US (roughly) plus a bunch of land lines but let's forget about the land lines entirely."
I prefer we not forget about land lines entirely, because I am far more annoyed by such calls on my land line than my cell line (and get more on my land line).... and I can do MORE to prevent such calls on my call (with apps), although it is still a big problem on either.
>"So, yeah, very easy to see how we'd be hitting 1 billion robo calls in the US every week or maybe 50-55
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Given that call centers running these operations can have more than one outgoing line, your math is irrelevant.
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Multiple companies running multiple robocall campaigns that make hundreds maybe thousands of calls an hour for multiple years, It's very believable.
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Do the math please.
How many seconds are in an hour?
How long does it take to connect a phone call?
To make a billion phone calls would take over 20 years.
I somehow don't think these companies have been at it that long... maybe a quarter of that.
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You keep demonstrating you have no fucking idea how this technology works, and you keep arguing a stupid point which indicates you don't know half of what you think you do.
A robodialer [wikipedia.org] dials a whole lot of numbers at the same time:
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>"How long does it take to connect a phone call? To make a billion phone calls would take over 20 years."
But there are hundreds or thousands of entities doing it continuously, at least 2/3rds of the day (typical waking hours). And each entity can make potentially hundreds of calls simultaneously. So that is potentially hundreds of thousands of calls every several seconds. That is perhaps 1 billion each DAY!
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So the problem is not the company that does it, the problem is the telecom that allows it. Seriously the penalties should be applied to the telecoms for failing to control it. Not based upon content but based upon numbers of calls and their duration. Those spam calls are readily recognisable, by the frequency and duration, simply disconnect the customer when they break the rules of the number of connections allowed in any time period, when they telecom fails to do so, fine them and imprison their executives
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The problem is both. And I do agree that the telcoms should be held responsible also for allowing it to continue. They do nothing to help ensure caller ID isn't spoof and do nothing to stop what are clearly illegal schemes.
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Math, and a grasp of the scale of the problem being discussed.
There are around 800M active phone numbers allocated in the U.S. If they called each one just 3 times, that's 2.4 billion calls.
Alternately, there's about 290M people 20y or older in the U.S. If each one gets an average of just one illegal robocall per week (I wish!), that's 15 billion illegal calls per year.
And nothing in the article gives any indication of what sort of time span they're talking about - it seems very unlikely that a company wo
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Sounds like you are assuming a single source of calls that operates in real time. That's not how any of this works.
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>"Given that they are leaving an audible message that is supposed to be heard by humans, yes... I'm assuming that it operates in real time."
That is only for calls that are answered. Often they hang up if they don't get a connection to a "real" person or within "X" rings. Often they hang up WHEN they get a connection, and just note that there is a sucker and note the time/day and then step up the calls to that number by real people or other machines. And I believe each of the systems doing this can oft
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it generally takes 3 to 4 seconds just to complete a SINGLE connection
Here, I helpfully elucidated for you why you are an idiot.
Ask me how I know you are not a programmer. Why on Slashdot? It seems like you could go in any mall and demonstrate how stupid you are.
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2,000. That's typical autodialer for a PC-baautodi (Score:2)
> how many of these calls do you seriously think they could make at once
2,000, per unit.
2,000 simultaneous calls is typical for an autodialer running on commodity PC hardware.
NOW do the math.
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He seems to be imagining some sort of system with a mechanical hand to give the crank 3 or 4 quick turns and then tell "Mabel" who it wants to call.
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If Mabel is a play on Ma Bell, then full points awarded.
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I'd think if you are using 2,000 lines to simultaneously and continually make calls 24h/day, that's going to raise at least some flags with the telecom provider. Also, while the cost of a single line might be neglible, the cost of 2,000 phone lines is not. In practice, there's going to be a much smaller limit on how many outgoing phone lines you'd get from companies that are not already well enough off that they shouldn't need to resort to illegal robocalling in order to generate revenue.
And finally,
You think call centers don't exist? (Score:2)
From everything you just said it would seem you think call centers don't exist?
That's all this is - a call center, with no minimum wage employees required because it's a recording.
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And finally, each call is going to take some amount of real time that is long enough to complete a call, let the phone ring, and leave a message. There are only so many minutes in a day, so that's going to put yet another cap on the number of calls that can actually be made in a given amount of time.
My god, you are incredibly dense. I mean, even by slashdot standards, you are exhibiting a remarkable level of stupidity.
The amount of time each call takes to connect is irrelevant. Anything done at scale is done in parallel.
Here's a thought experiment: if a web page takes 1 second to load, how many web pages can a single server deliver per hour?
(Hint: the answer is way higher than 3600)
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Sure, but with phone lines, parallel isn't free. one phone line is cheap. 2000 of them? Not so much... especially after you factor in usage time.
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>that's going to raise at least some flags with the telecom provider.
Why? I mean sure - they're going to know you're probably a robocall center, but what do they care? You're a nice tidy source of profits for them, they have no reason to shut you down. That's why there's pressure to try to pass a law requiring telephone companies to shut down robocall centers - because they have absolutely no economic incentive to do so.
You just proved web sites are impossible (Score:2)
It takes several seconds to load a web page. With only 35 million seconds in a year, that means a company can show a web page no more than 10 million times in a year.
So for example let's Facebook, where a single user might load a page 1,000 times in a year. 10 million total page loads (based on second per year) divided by 1,000 page loads per user in a year. Facebook can have no more than 100,000 users. That's what you proved.
Unless of course a web site can serve pages to two people at once.* Or a phone
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Actually, assuming each call takes 1 minute, and they call within a 12 hour window each day (in fact, many calls are shorter and they call into 3 time zones AND outside of the 8-8 window all the time), they would need about 3800 simultaneous dialers to do a billion calls a year.
Given voip software, that's easily doable with less than a half rack of hardware.
That's also pretty much freely scaleable, so with a full rack of hardware, they could easily do 2 billion calls a year.
Your figures sort of make sense i
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Except for the fact that while one phone line cost might be negligible, 3800 phone lines is not.
And for the companies that *are* big enough to afford this, one would expect that the companies would not need to resort to illegal robocalling to generate revenue.
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Apparently you WOULD be surprised how cheap it can be for VOIP in bulk. Consider, it's cheap enough that Google can afford to give them away.
For example, here [switchtel.co.za], you can get a 4000 channel trunk for 85,000 Rand/month ($5815.53). If someone actually answers, it costs 0.49R/minute ($0.035) billed in 1 second intervals (great if you expect frequent hang-ups) for calls to the United States. Not at all a bad deal if you can get paid in USD and pay your expenses in R.
And that's literally the first hit on Google. I'
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3.5 cents per minute would only be relevant for the calls that actually connect either to a person or answering machine, but my understanding would be that all it takes to get billed that amount is calling a live number, and then one is still billed for at least that first second. Assuming only 10% of the calls that you make actually get through (depending on the population density within an area code, it could be much higher), with that many lines, it still ends up costing an average of $14 per minute fo
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First, I was quite clear that the billing is granular to the second, I was also clear that that was the very first hit, because it's just not worth thoroughly researching since I'm not intending to set up a robocall operation.
Yes, I do think it's cheap, since they are getting paid for each call they make.
When you consider that companies used to be willing to pay a much higher rate for a human being in the U.S. to actually sit in a cubicle giving the spiel rather than a recording or a voice synth, yes I beli
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The amount they get paid by their multiple customers also scales with the number of connections they make. This should be damned obvious.
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Sure... but just how long do you think it will take to do that?
Bear in mind that even just connecting a phone call takes between 3 to 4 seconds, let alone leaving an annoying message like "This is the IRS, a warrant has been issued, blah blah blah...", work out just how long it will take to call that many numbers.
See the problem?
It strains credulity to think that these companies have been doing this long
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Overload what switch? About 15 years ago I did some tech work for a small robocall company. Small as in two employees and about thirty computers making the calls. About twenty of those computers would dial around ten or fifteen numbers per minute. Numbers that answered were sent to one of the other ten or so computers that played a recorded message.
And they were actually very careful about staying legal-the phone number database they used sorted the numbers into time zones, and the computers would not call
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mark-t ( 151149 ):
Sure... but just how long do you think it will take to do that?... Bear in mind that even just connecting a phone call takes between 3 to 4 seconds, let alone leaving an annoying message See the problem?... It strains credulity to think that these companies have been doing this long enough to have completed even half a billion calls, let alone multiple billions.
I'm not sure if you're being coy or if you honestly don't understand. I'll go with honestly.
Here's the story:
The way it
I think you spelled Jail Terms wrong (Score:2)
Fines don't work.
Also, are these only for firms actually in the US? What about all the scammers in India and China?
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Screw jail. Lock them in a room. They get a stocked fridge, a toilet, and a microwave. Sadly (for them), they also get a phone. There are two rules. First, they MUST answer the phone every time it rings or a painfully loud horn will sound. Second, if they don't put it on hook and ready for the next call, the horn sounds until they do.
They must stay there until they have answered as many calls as they have made. Or they starve because it's hard to eat when the damned phone keeps ringing.
This event to be tel
Robo calls are a form of "Freedom of Speech"... (Score:2)
...One can choose to listen or not. No?
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Message itself is still protected. But what good is speech if you have no phone call, Mr. Anderson?
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...One can choose to listen or not. No?
I wasn't aware that robots, auto-dialers, or tape-recording machines had rights to free speech under the US Constitution.
They do not.
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The latest batch of robocalls I've received warned me that my SSN was suspended and if I didn't respond immediately (presumably by giving a ton of personal information or sending them money), I'd be arrested. The others I've received are for car warranties and college loans I don't have. These are definitely NOT free speech, but scam attempts. You can't label a scam "free speech" and expect to escape any consequences.
Four Down... (Score:1)
Here's a more worthwhile discussion topic: I'm not trolling, but do think the U.S. is better or worse off being connected to the rest of the world via the Internet? I've cleaned up so much malware from the vulnerable. I've discussed so many robo-scams with concerned seniors. I think of all the industrial/corporate thefts. I know of many municipal system hackings. And there's the successful religious extremism recruiting (and the clean-up we've had to deal with as
Telcos (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been said before, but worth reiterating. The operations that were 'fined', likely run out of a condo suite, will fold without paying the fine, and then re-emerge down the block under a different name and do the same thing over again.
The growing telemarketing problem can be solved by simply holding the telcos responsible. Anything else is theatrics meant to distract the public from the fact that the telcos make money through this arrangement, and have successfully bought their way into Washington and the regulators there.
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The FTC makes no data publicly available on their collection rate so that the citizenry can follow this up?
How does that work?
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The spoofing ought to die with "SHAKEN-STIR" - from there some popular cell app with a Bayesian classifier ought to have a decent blacklist within a few weeks.
As long as they're spoofing the blacklist value is limited.
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That oughta do it. Thanks very much, Ray. (Score:2)
Where's jail time, bank account seizures and company liquidation?
Fines are nothing more than the price of doing business like taxes or kickbacks to politicians.
CNet hacked? (Score:2)
Were the fines more than the money they made? (Score:2)
Translation is: (Score:2)
From TFA:
The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday said the agency reached settlements with four operations responsible for billions of illegal robocalls
And:
The fines the FTC imposed on the companies and their owners range from $500,000 to over $3 million.
And the translation is: We don't care that you're doing what you're doing, just so long as we get a cut.
I wish that blocked calls were really blocked (Score:1)
I have a Samsung S8 phone and every time I get a robocall I add it to the "block this caller" list.
Which is fine as far as it goes; my phone doesn't ring for incoming calls from that exact phone number again.
But (and it's a big but) the incoming blocked call is routed to my voicemail and I get a message left there that I then have to take steps to delete.
It would be a lot more useful if block this call meant block this call and not just don't ring the phone but route it to voicemail instead.
that's just great (Score:2)
now they will be making more robocalls to pay the fine...