Dozens of robocall businesses across the country are being formally put on notice, shortly after North Carolina won a $5 million judgment against a Texas man and his business that were found responsible for routing tens of millions of robocalls to North Carolinians’ phones.
North Carolina Attorney General Jeff Jackson on Thursday sent warning letters — on behalf of all U.S. states — to 37 companies allegedly violating the rules meant to protect people against robocalls. North Carolina is a co-leader of the nationwide effort to crack down on robocalls, along with Indiana and Ohio. Jackson said in an interview Thursday there’s a good reason for that.
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“It’s not in people's imaginations,” he said. “Robocalls really have gotten worse over the last five years, especially in North Carolina. We're a top five state nationally for robocalls. It's about 200 million a month. So we decided we needed to get more aggressive.”
North Carolina’s leadership of the anti-robocall task force began under former Attorney General Josh Stein, who’s now the governor, and has continued under Jackson.
Thursday's letters accuse the targeted companies of intentionally violating robocall protection rules, in order to profit off the scams at the heart of those calls. A handful are based overseas, in India or Hong Kong, but most are American companies.
“What we want to do is, by targeting these companies, send a message,” Jackson said in the interview. “Not just to them, but to the entire telecommunications space, that we are cracking down on these robocalls. And we expect all of them to do everything they can do to help us out.”
USTelecom, an industry advocacy group for phone companies and others in the telecommunications business, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday. It wasn’t clear if any of the accused companies targeted by the letters Thursday are members of that group. The group’s website says it supports efforts to fight robocalls.
“Stopping the plague of illegal robocalls is a serious issue for consumers, and our USTelecom member companies, industry partners, and folks at the FCC, FTC, DOJ and state Attorneys General offices are investing time and resources to fight back,” USTelecom says.
Jackson said in an interview Thursday that the state has long gone after robocall scammers themselves. But he compared it to a game of whack-a-mole, where every time they’d knock down one bad actor, another would pop up. Enforcement needs to get more aggressive, he said, with a stronger focus on the phone companies that allow the calls to go through in the first place.
Most Americans, he noted, get phone service from one of three companies: AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile. But in reality, those three companies rely on a massive network of smaller companies to handle their calls. Jackson and the other AGs don't accuse any of those large companies — or even smaller competitors that are also household names — of breaking the law themselves. But, he told WRAL, those companies also don’t always catch it when the smaller companies under them do break the law and put illegal robocalls on their networks, directed to their customers.
“Those big three rely on hundreds and hundreds of these smaller telecom companies,” he said. “By the time your phone rings, on average, it has passed through six or seven different companies. The last one is the one you pay a monthly bill to. But all of the ones in between, they all have a legal obligation to do everything they can to block a bunch of robocalls. And, frankly, we don't think they're doing it.”
In an indication of the web of companies involved, the letters Jackson sent out Thursday were mostly directed at the 37 companies named. But he said there are 99 more phone companies, who do business with the others, and who were also put on notice.
Jackson and the other state attorneys general said they will give those companies three weeks to start complying with laws meant to guard against robocalls. If not, they say, legal action could follow.
Thursday’s announcement putting the companies on notice pointed to millions in legal judgments North Carolina has recently won against robocall operators, including $5 million from a Texas man whose company was “providing substantial assistance to fraudsters that operated robocall and telemarketing scams in North Carolina and across the country by accepting and routing millions of illegal and fraudulent calls,” Jackson wrote in a statement.