In May 2023, according to a suit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, VoIP provider Avid Telecom “chose profit over running a business that conforms to state and federal law.” The press release noted that Avid Telecom used spoofed or invalid caller ID numbers in 7.5 billion calls to telephone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. Avid Telecom owner Michael Lansky, and its vice president Stacey Reeves were named in the suit which was filed by 48 States and Washington, D.C. Back in August, the Federal Communications Commission levied a whopping fine of nearly $300M against an auto warranty operation run by Roy M. Cox and Aaron Michael Jones. Re-recorded voice calls to mobile phones without having prior express consent, violating spoofing laws, dialing numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry; Cox and Jones ran through the Greatest Hits of Bad Lead Gen Actors during their three-month span which included 5 billion robocalls to 500 million numbers. The next month in September, an Illinois federal court ruled that lead generator Day Pacer and three of the company’s executives violated the Telemarketing Sales Rule (TSR) over 4 million times. The defendants’ claims, including that the TSR is unconstitutional, were all rejected by the court. Alston & Bird’s Terance Gonsalves has an insightful breakdown of this ruling and the case in which the defendants made “at least 3,669,914 calls to phone numbers on the DNC registry.”
