Community Chat

[Kachina624]

Telemarketers are prohibited from making prerecorded phone calls to people without prior consent. It's also illegal to deliberately falsify caller ID with the intent to harm or defraud consumers. 

Federal regulators on Thursday said they've identified "the perpetrator of one of the largest ... illegal robocalling campaigns" they've ever investigated.

The Federal Communications Commission has proposed a $120 million fine for a Miami resident said to be single-handedly responsible for almost 97 million robocalls over just the last three months of 2016.

Officials say Adrian Abramovich auto-dialed hundreds of millions of phone calls to landlines and cellphones in the U.S. and Canada, and at one point even overwhelmed an emergency hospital paging service.

Making prerecorded telemarketing phone calls to someone without their prior consent is prohibited. So is making telemarketing calls to emergency phone lines and deliberately falsifying caller ID to disguise identity with the intent to harm or defraud consumers.

According to the FCC, the robocalls made by Abramovich through his ambiguously named companies (Marketing Strategy Leaders or Marketing Leaders) would show up "spoofed" as if they came from a phone number with the same area code and the same first three digits of the recipient's number.

If the recipients answered, they'd get a recording offering an "exclusive" vacation deal from prominent travel companies such as Expedia, Marriott, Hilton or TripAdvisor — instructing them to "press 1" to learn more. But pressing 1 would instead land people on a line with a call center hawking "discounted" vacation packages and timeshares unaffiliated with any of those brands.

According to FCC documents, TripAdvisor investigated some of the robocalls that purported to offer that company's deals and found call centers that it said were based in Mexico.

Abramovich now faces the largest penalty ever proposed by the FCC, according to FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn. The fine is for Abramovich's unlawful caller-ID spoofing, the FCC says. The agency's Enforcement Bureau has also issued a citation to Abramovich, and the documents say his "mass robocalling campaigns violate the Communications Act, and his misrepresentations in the prerecorded messages constitute criminal wire fraud."

Abramovich now has 30 days to respond to the FCC, which is expected to finalize the investigation and penalties in the following months.

[CareBears]

@Kachina624 Karma at it's very best!

[bonnielu]

Good  news.  I do feel left out.  I get 5 calls a day and never had one from this group.  I am  so sick of any call that I did not ask for.   My caller ID is full of calls from almost every state in the US and then some.  I never pick up.  I instead use Mr. Number... an app which identifies the caller and the scam.  I do have a land line and a cell phone.  Comcast only gives me a 25 call limit to block.  My home phone is about the same. 

There is no reason that any of this should be happening.

I even have a friend who got a call from a group that wanted to change his credit card AND GIVE HIM A BETTER DEAL.  They simply asked him if he was..... used his name.... he said YES.  That YES signed him up for something and he had to get a lawyer to get him out of it. 

[catwhisperer]

No wonder my phone has not rung all day.

[cotton4me]

Hooray.  These people really annoy me.  They don’t mention jail time, only a fine.  I wonder if it’s even an option. 

We have a call blocking device but they’re always coming up with new numbers.  Lately they were spoofing calls from, not only from our area code, but also our exchange, which is mentioned in the article.  I recently blocked our exchange because the calls were growing in frequency.     

[cotton4me]

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@catwhisperer wrote:

No wonder my phone has not rung all day.

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Lol.  Mine has been particularly quiet today too.  

[Spurt]

In addition to the fine, I think this guy should be put in jail and made to answer millions of robo and telemarketing calls............

[Mom2Dogs]

Good, hope he goes to jail

[Spurt]

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@cotton4me wrote:

Hooray.  These people really annoy me.  They don’t mention jail time, only a fine.  I wonder if it’s even an option. 

We have a call blocking device but they’re always coming up with new numbers.  Lately they were spoofing calls from, not only from our area code, but also our exchange, which is mentioned in the article.  I recently blocked our exchange because the calls were growing in frequency.     

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@cotton4me

They'll even spoof your own number!!!! 

[SharkE]

HSN sells 'call blocker'  a little box that blocks calls. Number pops up you don't recognize you hit the red button, they can't call back they have been blocked. I've got 2, gave sister one too, so bought 3.