
Man Accused of Making Millions of Robocalls Faces Biggest-Ever FCC Fine - happy-go-lucky
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/22/533970545/man-accused-of-making-millions-of-robocalls-faces-biggest-ever-fcc-fine
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Waterluvian
If you "overwhelm an emergency paging service", I feel like it should become a
criminal matter beyond just wire fraud.

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duskwuff
Good.

I was getting a couple of calls a day from this campaign for a while. It was
pretty easy to recognize -- but it was still pretty annoying. Multiply that by
a few million, and the amount of time wasted must be immense.

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ReverseCold
I have a very long email thread of voicemail transcripts from this. Very
annoying.

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mariuolo
Will they be able to pay $120M? And will there be also personal sanctions for
the individuals responsible for this?

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vabmit
The most recent information visible in search about this guy's company shows
he was making a little over $20,000/year. A recent traffic related arrest of
someone with the same name as his in the same area where he is reported to
live shows a residence in a cheap beach condo high rise in a low cost part of
southern Florida.

All that misery he put out into the world and he probably only made around
$20K/yr (probably from mentally vulnerable/disabled populations). Have any of
you ever actually purchased a cruise vacation from a robo-caller that spammed
you in the middle of the night?

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NewCoke
Please ELI5: What is the tech behind this? How is he able to do this?

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bkmartin
I really hope that the investigation gets to the tech and allows the phone
companies to actually shut this stuff down. I get calls every day from
robocallers on my cell phone. Every now and then I get a real person on the
line and can usually get them to swear at me when I give them a hard time for
trying to scam people. Part of me feels bad because they probably don't know
any better, but seriously? How can you not know? How many pissed off people do
they talk to everyday because of this... Deceitful practices like this are
exhausting and the politicians seem to not care at all.

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cosmie
There's not really any special sauce in the tech. I scanned the FCC Order and
didn't see a reference to a particular autodialer, but there are dozens to
choose from.

If his service was purely playing an automated IVR message and the live call
center he hot-transferred to was someone else, I could see him making a custom
solution to cut costs. But it'd be fairly easy to make that volume of calls
via most enterprise level autodialers without raising any eyebrows as long as
there were enough agent licenses to support it.

Most autodialers bake in regulatory compliance functionality and warnings, but
the laws that apply are so specific to an individual user that those features
can be disabled or overridden and they leave it up to the client to understand
what laws their calling must adhere to.

For example, the guy in question would have been legally fine to spam 100mm
calls in three months if they had been business landlines, as the federal law
they're leveraging for their fine only applies "to emergency phone lines,
wireless phones, or residential telephone lines"[1]

[1]In the first paragraph of the order:
[http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...](http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db0622/DA-17-593A1.pdf)

