Six prepaid calling card providers found guilty of deceptive marketing
A half-dozen prepaid calling card providers were slapped by the Federal Communications Commission with a combined $30 million in fines for “deceptively marketing” their products.
The FCC found that Locus Telecommunications, Lyca Tel, NobelTel, Simple Network, STi Telecom and Touch-Tel USA targeted immigrant consumers with their calling cards that offered “only a fraction of the promised minutes due to the companies’ assessment of multiple fees and surcharges that were not clearly and conspicuously disclosed to consumers.” Each company was assessed $5 million in fines.
“Consumers should not have to comb through small print and contradictory disclosures to learn that the bold promises made in advertisements are false and misleading,” said Travis LeBlanc, chief of the FCC Enforcement Bureau. “Companies that use deceptive tactics to betray consumer trust should expect to face stiff penalties.”
The FCC said it issued Notices of Apparent Liability in 2011 and 2012 to each of the companies linked to these “deceptive practices.”
The FCC has recently tagged a number of telecom operators with fines related to performance and operational issues. AT&T earlier this year was hit with a $25 million fine tied to the unauthorized disclosure of personal information of nearly 280,000 U.S. customers; while CenturyLink and Intrado were dinged $17.4 million in fines connected to 911 service outages.
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