Attorney General sues telephone service provider for allegedly routing illegal scam calls

By Anjali Patel

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    North Carolina (WLOS) — North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein is suing a telephone service provider for allegedly violating the Telemarketing Sales Rule and facilitating illegal and fraudulent telemarketing calls and robocalls that targeted millions of people in the U.S. — including hundreds of thousands of North Carolinians.

The suit claims in a period of a few months in 2020 and 2021, the company, Articul8, and its owner Paul K. Talbot of Texas, are responsible for routing more than 65 million calls to phone numbers in NC, with some North Carolinians receiving between 50 and 200 calls in a single day.

“These scam calls, robocalls we get on our phones that drive us crazy — many of them originate offshore, in other countries. So it’s really hard to hold those people accountable. But here’s the deal: those calls couldn’t reach your line if there wasn’t some gateway telephone provider willing to accept that traffic and hand it off to downstream carriers,” AG Stein said.

The AG’s office is alleging that since 2015, Articul8 has knowingly allowed domestic and international scammers to route scam calls to millions on the U.S. telephone network. The lawsuit claims those calls included government imposter scams, auto warranty scams, computer security scams, Amazon imposters, monthly bill scams and even a telephone attack on a hospital emergency room.

“It can not only tie up your and my telephone, it can tie up an emergency room, where people are desperate for healthcare, obviously, they’re in an emergency. So there are more consequences than just you and me being annoyed — it can really cause damage to people,” AG Stein said.

The suit claims Articul8 profited by allowing high volumes of calls into the U.S. telephone network while scammers profited by tricking people out of their money. AG Stein said the company even continued to allow these calls even after being warned by the telecom industry group that traces suspicious and illegal calls and by federal law enforcement about the calls it was accepting and routing into and across the country.

In January, Attorney General Stein led a bipartisan group of 51 attorneys general urging the FCC to put in place measures that would stem the tide of foreign illegal calls through gateway providers like Articul8.

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