XCast fined $10 million over illegal Robocall operation

The US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced yesterday that it has reached a settlement with VoIP service provider XCast over allegations that it facilitated illegal telemarketing campaigns since January 2018.

In addition to prohibiting the company from violating the law, the stipulated order requires it to meet other compliance measures, including establishing a process to screen its customers and advocate for potentially illegal telemarketing. The  ruling, which calls for a $10 million civil penalty, was also suspended due to XCast unable to pay .

 “ XCastprovidedVoIPservicesthat transmitted billions of illegal robocalls to American consumers, including fraudulent calls claiming to be from government agencies,” the Justice Department said in a press release.

These calls included pre-recorded marketing messages, most of which were sent to numbers listed on the National Do Not Call Registry . Falsely claiming to be affiliated with government agencies or containing outright false or misleading information, in an attempt to trick victims into making purchases .

For example, some calls claimed to be from the Social Security Administration and threatened to cut off utility service to the recipient unless immediate payments were made.  In other cases, consumers were urged to act quickly to cancel bogus credit card charges .

As part of the proposed settlement, XCast was ordered to sever its relationships with companies that do not comply with US telemarketing laws .

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said in a statement that, “The Los Angeles-based company did nothing despite warning several times that illegal robocallers were using its services,” adding that “ which prevents   XCast Labs from providing VoIP services to any company that does not have an automated procedure to block calls that display invalid phone numbers or that are not authenticated through the FCC’s STIR/SHAKEN authentication framework.”

This development comes as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced a ban on Response Tree from helping anyone else make robocalls or to phone numbers on the Do Not Call registry .

The California-based company was also accused of operating more than 50 websites, such as PatriotRefi[.]com , AbodeDefense[.]com , and TheRetailRewards[.]com , all of which used manipulative dark patterns to “trick #consumers into providing their personal information for the purported purposes of return loans.” Mortgage financing and other services .

The defendants allegedly sold information collected from hundreds of thousands of consumers to telemarketers who used it to make millions of illegal telemarketing calls, including robocalls, to consumers across the country .