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posted by martyb on Monday July 19 2021, @11:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the thought-they-were-really-cleaning-up dept.

Feds crack down on brothers behind 45 million illegal robocalls:

Three New Jersey brothers will pay $1.6 million to settle charges of instigating more than 45 million illegal robocalls nationwide, including to tens of millions of Americans on the Federal Trade Commission's Do Not Call Registry, the agency announced on Friday.

The siblings also agreed to a permanent ban on telemarketing and will hand over a residential property to resolve the agency's allegations, made in a complaint filed by Department of Justice on behalf of the FTC.

According to the FTC's suit, Joseph, Sean and Raymond Carney initiated more than 45 million illegal telemarketing calls to people across the U.S. between January 2018 and March 2019 to pitch a line of septic tank cleaning products. Most of the calls, or 31 million, were placed to numbers on the FTC's registry of people who don't want to receive marketing calls.

[...] Telemarketers working on behalf of the brothers falsely told consumers they were calling from an environmental company to offer free information on their septic tank cleaning products, the complaint charges.


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  • (Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday July 20 2021, @06:49PM (2 children)

    by fakefuck39 (6620) on Tuesday July 20 2021, @06:49PM (#1158374)

    >a standard system should be enforced through the FCC, a government entity
    whose standard? what goverment? half the calls we get are from overseas call centers that show up w/ a US business's number despite coming from another country. no one cares what standard we put in place, no one is going to bother following it irrelevant of what regulation or standard the US passes. And yes, I still want my incoming calls to go through.

    >Why should a new jersey company be able to use a california phone number
    and you can enforce that. except none of the spam calls are initiated in california or jersey. they're all coming via voip from another country, just like the incoming call from bank of america's customer service is coming from another country. and there's nothing you can do to force a telco in that country to follow any standard you make up. you can only block the call completely, and then you'd lose all your customers, because me - I want that call from my bank to go through.

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  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @08:37PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 20 2021, @08:37PM (#1158425)

    You are still doom crying without giving any tangible reasons beyond your feeling that nobody would play ball. The US could easily require that all international calls that are routed into this country are closely tracked. As I said in a previous post, all those calls require the US company to bill back, so they know exactly who is calling already. We could absolutely enforce a system where international telecoms that transmit spam calls are just dropped by US telcos. US telcos wont want to do it but the FCC could absolutely require it. If a US company wants to set up a call center in india, they'll have to go through a telecom that actually checks the phone calls. Why would they do that? Money, plain and simple. If they want their calls going through to america so they can get a cutback, they have to manage their customers. Note, they don't have to have our system in place at all. All they have to do is not give spammers free reign on their network or they are less likely to be trafficked into the US. You could enforce penalties on US companies that do business with telcos that do nothing to stop the spam. In actual first world countries I could absolutely see governments enacting similar systems and I see absolutely no reason why international companies wouldn't enact policies that go beyond the borders of the US. And my point about a new jersey company being able to use a california phone number is even more important in the international scope. There is even LESS reason for a company who operates in india to be able to use any US phone number without any basic checks. Again, if the company who operates that call center in India was forced to purchase or license those phone numbers from a US telco, we can verify the people using those numbers are associated with an actual US company. Then it becomes far easier to prosecute individuals who abuse the network. Accountability doesn't hamper anyone's ability to make or receive calls.

    So maybe for your next post you could come up with actual reasons why there can't be ANY kind of system in place to accomplish the end goal of attenuating spam calls. Your protestations that it just can't be done, full stop, are unconvincing at best.

    • (Score: 2) by fakefuck39 on Tuesday July 20 2021, @08:57PM

      by fakefuck39 (6620) on Tuesday July 20 2021, @08:57PM (#1158436)

      >You are still doom crying
      so saying all the world's thousands of telcos won't follow a US standard is "doom crying" to you. gotcha

      >any tangible reasons beyond your feeling that nobody would play ball
      not at all. I'm sure a few would play ball, like they did by adopting the american analog TV and then digital TV standards, followed by emission standards, followed by our measuring units, followed our cell frequencies, which is why you don't need special phones to have them work worldwide.

      >why there can't be ANY kind of system in place to accomplish the end goal of attenuating spam calls
      we do have many various systems implemented by different telcos. they have been in place for decades and are constantly being upgraded. some are implemented by carriers, some by the telcos themselves. you have zero idea of what you're talking about.
      https://www.t-mobile.com/customers/scam-shield [t-mobile.com]