If for whatever reason you decide that you want to start up a scam call operation, one thing you should try to avoid, if possible, is calling the very people you are posing as. Unfortunately, no one warned the two imposters of this when they decided to pose as members of the FCC “Fraud Prevention Team” and they ended up calling FCC staff members. Now the company that enabled the whole fraudulent operation is staring down a $4.5 million fine.
Here’s how this whole thing went down, according to the FCC: Two people who identified themselves by the names “Christian Mitchell” and “Henry Walker” registered accounts with Telnyx, a VOIP service provider based in Texas. The two claimed to be living at the same address in Toronto, Canada, despite the fact that their IP addresses pinned them in Scotland and England, and they both had email addresses registered to the domain mariocop123.com.
Despite the indicators that something fishy was afoot, Telnyx allowed the two to register accounts anyway, which they used to launch a very short-lived spam call campaign. Over the course of two days in February 2024, the two scammers placed 1,797 imposter calls claiming to be coming from the Federal Communications Commission’s Fraud Prevention Team—a thing that does not exist.
Most of the callers ended up with a prerecorded voicemail left in their inbox. For the few unfortunate souls who picked up, the FCC said they were subjected to attempts to “threaten, intimidate, and defraud.” One victim reported that the fraudsters demanded they pay $1,000 in Google gift cards to avoid jail time for “crimes against the state.”
Somehow, at least a few of those 1,797 calls that the scammers placed managed to hit the phones of FCC staff members and their families. The FCC still isn’t sure how that happened, as the agency stated it doesn’t “publish or otherwise share staff personal phone numbers.”
However that happened, it seems to have put the whole operation on the FCC’s radar, and now it’s coming down on Telnyx for failing to comply with Know Your Customer rules designed to prevent malicious actors from making use of these networks in the first place. Per the FCC’s investigation, the VOIP firm only collected a name, email address, physical address, and IP address from the applicants, with no verification process in place to confirm that information. That, as it turns out, is how you end up facilitating a spam call operation.
Telnyx denies that it failed to live up to the FCC’s standards, issuing a statement that claims it has “done everything and more than the FCC has required for Know-Your-Customer (‘KYC’) and customer due diligence procedures.” The FCC doesn’t quite see it that way and proposed a $4,492,500 fine against Telnyx for the whole fiasco. That’s going to take a lot of Google gift cards to pay off.
