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WTF?! A group of robocallers impersonating FCC employees made the amateur mistake of trying to scam actual commission employees last year. They likely had no idea they had inadvertently dialed the very regulators responsible for cracking down on them.
The calls occurred on the night of February 6 and the morning of February 7 last year, as the FCC recently revealed. Over a dozen FCC employees, along with some of their relatives, received automated calls featuring an artificial voice introducing itself as the “FCC Fraud Prevention Team.” The robotic voice instructed recipients to press 1 to speak with a representative immediately or 2 to schedule a callback.
One recipient reported being told they needed to fork over $1,000 in Google gift cards to avoid going to jail for “crimes against the state.”
Now, the FCC doesn’t even have a “Fraud Prevention Team,” so as you can imagine, it wasn’t too thrilled about having its name dragged like that. In an announcement on Tuesday, the commission proposed a $4.5 million fine against the voice service provider Telnyx, accusing the company of enabling the robocalls by violating “Know Your Customer (KYC)” rules.
Some details about how the robocalls went down have also come to light. On February 6, 2024, Telnyx accepted two new customers using the aliases “Christian Mitchell” and “Henry Walker,” who provided fake Canadian addresses and sketchy “mariocop123.com” email domains. The robocallers paid for the service with cryptocurrency to cover their tracks.
Over the next day, the “MarioCop” accounts launched approximately 1,800 calls before Telnyx caught on and shut down the accounts.
From Telnyx’s perspective, it provides services that allow businesses to easily build AI voice bots and apps for making automated calls. It likely didn’t expect clients to use its platform for low-effort human scam calls – let alone to target federal agency staff.
When contacted by Ars Technica, Telnyx denied the FCC’s allegations and said it would contest the penalty. The company will get a chance to respond to these allegations and try to convince the FCC that it shouldn’t be fined. In some cases, telecom disputes like this end up settling for a lower amount.
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