The Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission said that a an ongoing joint effort to undermine and reduce spam and scam robocalls is bearing fruit.
The two agencies have been jointly focusing on robocall enforcement; the FTC calls its program “Operation Point of No Entry”. By targeting network providers who allow overseas-based scam and spam robocalls onto U.S. networks and working with the Industry Traceback Group (ITG), which identifies the scam traffic and how it is traversing U.S. telecom networks, the FTC and FCC as well as state attorneys general then focus on enforcement, including letters to those providers warning them to cut off the illegal robocall traffic or else face the fact that they could be cut off from other network providers.
The two agencies said that the collaboration has resulted in targeted enforcement measures against 24 point-of-entry Voice over IP service providers which were routing and transmitting illegal robocalls between 2021 and 2023. Those providers were associated with more than 300 telemarketing campaigns; a single campaign can mean hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of individual calls to U.S. phone numbers.
“After being contacted by Project PoNE staff, ITG traceback data showed that 22 of the 24 targets significantly curbed or altogether stopped the flow of illegal robocalls through their networks, as evidenced by the decrease in the combined tracebacks from 1,043 last year to 306 this year, a decrease of over 70 percent,” the FTC reported.
The FCC said that the seven gateway providers warned by the agencies included Acrobat Communications d/b/a Telstar Express, Bandwidth, CenturyLink, iDentidad Advertising Development, Tata Communications (America), Telco Connection, and TeleCall Telecommunications.
Its most recent enforcement focus included cease-and-desist letters being sent to seven VoIP providers which had been identified in more than 450 tracebacks, as the points of entry for around 150 illegal robocall campaigns. Those campaigns included impersonation of government agencies or businesses, utility disconnection scams, student loan and credit card debt relief scams. The FTC also noted that some of the campaigns specifically targeted Chinese-speaking communities in the U.S. and claimed to be with the “Chinese Consulate”, a package delivery company or a telephone service provider.
“The combined efforts of both agencies make the message clearer to these VoIP service providers that they need to be more vigilant gatekeepers of the U.S. telephone lines, especially against illegal robocalls coming from overseas,” the FTC said in a release.
