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Florida Man Behind 100 Million Robocalls Hit With $120 Million FCC Fine (chicagotribune.com)
In a massive strike, the Federal Communications Commission issued a $120 million fine on a massive robocall spoofing operation it deemed a threat to public safety. From a report: The FCC announced Thursday morning that it would leverage the fine against Adrian Abramovich, a Miami man who the commission said made almost 100 million spoofed robocalls over a three-month period at the end of 2016. The FCC argued that Abramovich's operation made the phony calls to trick consumers into answering them and listening to his advertising messages. The fine was based on 80,000 spoofed calls the commission had verified.
A complaint filed by the FCC against Abramovich in June 2017 alleged he had broken the Truth in Caller ID Act -- which prohibits callers from falsifying caller ID information to disguise their identity with intent to harm or defraud -- in perpetrating "one of the largest -- and most dangerous -- illegal robocalling campaigns that the commission has ever investigated."
A complaint filed by the FCC against Abramovich in June 2017 alleged he had broken the Truth in Caller ID Act -- which prohibits callers from falsifying caller ID information to disguise their identity with intent to harm or defraud -- in perpetrating "one of the largest -- and most dangerous -- illegal robocalling campaigns that the commission has ever investigated."
Since he has aggregately stole or taken away several human lifespans... I say capital punishment would be appropriate.
Ok, I want them to go after the idiots that are doing the phone IRS or Treasury calls where the robot caller says a warrant is issued for your arrest, or you are being sued, etc. and is phishing for PII or getting a payment
THOSE calls are dangerous for people
Hard time and nothing less than 10 years without chance of parole.
CAST YOUR VOTE, HERE.
Why do I have to deal with bigot scum like you on a regular basis.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
with the truth
It's a valid question.
Dickering over what this man did or how he should be punished is silly.
The real question is this: How can we design a system where, continuously, profitability is [nearly] only possible by playing according to well established rules?
Concretely, why aren't unknown phone callers required to submit Hashcash solutions, so as to render it resource-intensive to spam people? Why isn't there an audio CAPTCHA system, where the caller has to answer a question?
Come on!
This is the age of digital communication. It's time to update the communications protocols; if our solution is political rather than technical (e.g., we rely on reactionary regulatory agencies or Congressional "inquiries"), then we're fucked by definition. We can do better.
What can't he do?!
I doubt, this will hold up in court. The victims were neither harmed (unless every robocall is harmful), nor defrauded (they got to talk to vacation salespeople selling legitimate vacation-packages)...
Sadly, the First Amendment keeps spammers (of all kinds) protected from most measures that could be taken against them...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Phone numbers are spoofable so a company with a pool of phone lines (e.g. a customer service center) can make phone calls using any of those lines, and all those calls will show up as being from their single public-facing number on Caller ID.
If we're not going to update the phone system so this spoofed phone number is generated by the phone company instead of by the caller, then let's at least make it a crime to spoof the number to one that isn't yours.
They even have a twitter feed for it! https://twitter.com/_floridama...
Oh good, he owes money he doesn't have and thus doesn't have to pay. So what? Give him life in prison or the death penalty and see if anyone still wants to make robocalls?
What is the problem with our phone networks, such that all these robocalls can happen in the first place?
It should be trivially easy for Verizon/AT&T/etc to track down the originators and put a quick stop to it.
Seriously, no one is going to nail the opportunity to relate any Joke or comment on Google Duplex, which is going to do something similar but "legally".
OK, but where are the fines for all the other calls?
I hear GITMO is nice this time of year.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I get robocalls from spoofed caller IDs on a weekly basis. It's obvious that they are spoofing the caller ID, because the first 6 digits are exactly the same as my own number, and I don't know anybody whose phone number is close to mine! So... how do I go about getting the people that keep harassing me arrested and charged with violating the Truth in Caller ID Act? I can't ask for their real number to call them back on, because it's a recording -- it doesn't even give me a chance to request that they remove me from their list.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
These people don't care about the law or the threat of getting caught. The ONLY thing they care about is their own pocketbook. If every single robocall resulted in connecting to a real person he had to pay to try and convince you to buy something (to no avail), this would stop immediately. Even if you can only keep them on the phone for a couple of minutes, that costs them real money. Dial 1 every time you get a robocall. Pretend to be interested. Pretend to go look for your credit card while the guy waits on hold. Waste their time and money! If everyone did this just a couple times each day, NO ONE would even try to set up some kind of operation like this guy. It would be too expensive!
I say, make the time fit the crime. Send him to jail. His cell has a single phone that can ring at any time, including the night. It does so, quite frequently. Each call is a recording with some bogus sales pitch. At some time during the sales pitch, which could last up to 5 minutes, a 5 digit code may or may not be given. This code can then be entered into an interface on the wall, which will deliver a food pellet. This is his only way to eat (although he can get water). He may get time in the yard, but if he misses an important call, he might miss his food.
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Because the majority of the robocallers now use computer systems and work from India. The FCC is overwhelmed but they won't correct the problem at the source - by going after the telecoms to NOT send the calls through if they can't verify their location. Period. Spoofing numbers should be impossible, and yet we hear about the technological challenges of fixing it. But if were costing the telecoms money it would be fixed in months, if not weeks. This is how the FCC keeps the telecoms happy AND creates a continued reason for their enforcement arm to exist. Win/Win for them - Lose/Lose for us.
Is it though? How come most serial killers and rapist are white people? That's a valid question as their is a lot of poof and stats to back it up.
Whereas asking why are all Jews scammers makes no sense at all if we look at the scope of things. First off, was this guy even Jewish?
There*
I've gotten calls like this with phone numbers similar to local friends, but up until today it never was actually one of my friends. I answered, thinking it was my neighbor, and *bam* robocall. How can they possibly make any money off of this? Who doesn't recognize it as a robocall and hang-up immediately? And of that percentage, who actually buys stuff?
When I get robocalls, I let the Jolly Roger bots answer it for me.
WTF are those?
From context, it sounds like pre-recorded ads played from a tape?
But that makes no sense at all.
Someone care to enlighten the rest of us?
Authentication or CAPTCHAs can be an entirely end-to-end, application-level protocol; the existing infrastructure just needs to pass the data around. An iPhone is more than capable of answering phone calls silently, asking the caller (with text-to-speech) to enter the number resulting from the sum of 2 and 3, and then only ringing the recipient when the caller answers properly (or hanging up on the caller).
Politics is an inherently flawed means by which to solve technical problems; pointing guns at people and saying "Do this or else" is not a valid foundation for solving engineering problems. Even if you could get a "functional" government, it would only be transient; government is a worthless institution for progressing society, as shown by literally millennia of history.
FCC gets $120,000,000. What will they do with it? They probably wont divvy it up between the people affected by the caller. Probably buy electric cars and not use them to say they are a green branch of government. Dumb.
So someone in 2016 did bad stuff and was fined more money than he could ever pay back. Issue still exist in 2018 and is easy to fix. FORCE telcom's to not route calls from numbers that dont provide valid caller ID.
I was kind of hoping for a YouTube live stream of him being drawn and quartered. Are we not at that stage of societal decadence yet?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Easy to answer: Most scammers are not Jews. Another question: Why did your mother consume so many drugs while she was pregnant with you?
I'd like to see this rule applied to banks, and other large corporations when they're caught violating the laws.
Also: one down, how many gazillion of these bottom dwelling worms to go? I'm still getting 2 or 3 robocalls a day with faked caller ID on my cellphone.
Maybe we should just block all phone calls coming from Mar-a-Lago and see if that fixes the problem.
The calls...THEY'RE COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE!
You are welcome on my lawn.
These kinds of things have happened before. The guy is certainly well-protected from any judgements, and if FCC tries to collect they'll get an empty bag.
As for crime: violating FCC rules is, technically, a crime. Spoofing phone numbers, if it isn't a crime when done with intent to defraud, should be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
#DeleteFacebook
Every. Single. Time.
Based on the number of robo-calls I got on my cellphone *just today*, I figure about 10% of all robo-calls are coming to me. If there are a few others out there like me, then we account for half of those calls.
Seriously, WTF? It's gotten to the point where those calls are disrupting my day. If it's my bank or someone important, I need to answer. I may have to change my number (that I've had for 15+ years).
On a related rant, one of my coworkers eventually had to change her work phone number because a robo-call shop was using her number as their number on CallerID. Jeez - this is out of control.
And give all of us his phone number. I'd happily pay for that call!
So what I am seeing is that as long as I can make $2 or more per illegal call, I can just share my earnings with the US govt?
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I want him tortured