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posted by Fnord666 on Monday February 03 2020, @12:13AM   Printer-friendly
from the cut-them-off-at-the-source dept.

DOJ sues US telecom providers for connecting Indian robocall scammers:

The US Department of Justice has filed lawsuits (PDF and PDF) against two small telecommunications providers that have allegedly connected hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls from Indian call centers to US residents. The feds want a New York federal judge to cut off the companies' access to the US telephone network. The government says a judge has already issued a restraining order against one of the defendants.

Fraudulent robocalls are a serious problem in the United States—and the Justice Department says two US companies contributed significantly to the problem. Over a 23-day period in May and June of last year, for example, defendant TollFreeDeals connected 720 million calls to US numbers. According to the Justice Department, 425 million of the calls lasted for one second or less—suggesting that many were unwanted.

The feds say that during those two months, TollFreeDeals connected 182 million calls from a single India-based call center. Of these calls, more than 90 percent appeared to come from one of 1,000 source numbers. And of those numbers, more than 80 percent have been associated with fraudulent robocalls.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03 2020, @03:50AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 03 2020, @03:50AM (#953006)

    There are billions of phone numbers available under the NANP. But if you assume just 1 billion and that one percent of 1 percent of those are calling each other at a time, that is still 50,000 calls. 213 compared to 50,000 is less than half a percent of the total call volume for manual review, that is probably well below the noise floor.