Uncle Sam turns the screws on VoIP providers allegedly used by coronavirus, tax, bogus tech support scammers

The US government is cracking down on Voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers accused of giving safe harbor to robocall spammers. Uncle Sam's trade watchdog the FTC this month sent official notifications – read: strongly worded letters – against nine VoIP providers it says are allowing crooks to make illegal robocalls with coronavirus- …

[Imhotep]

A Confederation Of Dunces

In some neighborhoods you have to pay the local gang in control to operate your own racket on their turf.

The US government is the gang collecting the cut over here.

[YetAnotherLocksmith]

Fairly minor stuff for most, but they've acted far faster than normal. Usually it is years before they send out even a letter, this time it's been a month or so. Maybe, stuck at home, the FCC people realise how many people get these calls, because now they are sat there all day getting them too!

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, because only the U.S. has scamming robocalls. smh.

[Henry Wertz 1]

Assholes

These guys are packs of assholes. They know their systems are being abused. These greasy scammers will falsify caller ID, illegally robodial every number in the country, multiple times a day, and don't even limit the dialing rate to the rate their scam recording can play, so numerous illegally abandoned robocalls (exactly 11 seconds of dead air then a hangup), recording that plays choppy because the system won't keep up, and ones where I can push "1" to waste a live scammer's time and it just hangs up because of system overload.

The feds are kind of assholes about this too; I got a nice package from the FCC since I filed a complaint for each and every illegal call I got, by that point over 1000 complaints; the FCC fined them like $100 million for the caller ID stuff (not for the actual violating Do Not Call list..), but let the scammers self-report income, so they of course fraudulently said they could only afford to pay the fine at like $1 a month AND THE FCC LET THEM DO THIS!!!!!!!!! They didn't seize their illegal robodialing equipment, and in fact didn't even actually order them to stop doing it!