Final Transcript

 

FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION: Press Event

 July 18, 2023/10:30 a.m. CDT 

 

SPEAKERS

Todd 

Samuel Levine – Director, Bureau of Consumer Protection, FTC

Arun Rao - Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Consumer Protection Branch of the US DOJ

Loyaan Egal – Chief of the Enforcement Bureau, FCC 

Dave Yost – Attorney General, State of Ohio

Kwame Raoul – Attorney General, State of Illinois

[Call is already in progress]

PRESENTATION

Moderator Ladies and gentlemen, we do thank you for your patience. Please continue 

to hold the line. The conference should be underway shortly. Thank you. 

[Audio silence] 

Todd [Audio disruption] hearing from a series of speakers this morning about a 

cooperative effort involving federal and state law enforcement partners 

aimed at cracking down on illegal telemarketing calls. And after we hear 
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from all five speakers, we will take questions, first from those of you in 

the room, and then from those on the conference line. Please keep your 

questions focused on the topic of today's press conference only. 

And to kick things off this morning, I'd like to introduce Samuel Levine, 

who's the Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of 

Consumer Protection. 

Samuel Thank you, Todd. Good morning and welcome, everyone. I am Sam 

Levine, Director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer 

Protection. I'm pleased to be joined this morning by Arun Rao, Deputy 

Assistant Attorney General for the Consumer Protection Branch of the US 

Department of Justice; Loyaan Egal, Chief of the Enforcement Bureau of 

the Federal Communications Commission; and Attorney General Dave 

Yost from the state of Ohio; and Attorney General Kwame Raoul. 

I'm proud to stand with all these partners in announcing “Operation Stop 

Scam Calls,” a coordinated and bipartisan effort to help stop the scourge 

of illegal telemarketing calls. One hundred and two participants, including 

multiple federal agencies, all 50 states and the District of Columbia have 

amassed more than 180 actions as part of this effort, as well as 

collaborating in a large educational effort. As part of Operation Stop Scam 
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Calls, the FTC is today announcing five new enforcement actions against 

illegal robocalls and telemarketing fraud. I hope you'll look at the details 

of each case, as they tell a compelling story. 

Today though, I'd like to talk about two areas of focus for this effort. The 

first are consent farms. Consent farms are not the kind of farms that 

harvest crops and raise animals. Rather, they turbocharge the scourge of 

unwanted calls in this country by luring consumers with offers for jobs or 

rewards, tricking them into turning over their personal information and 

claiming consumers have been consented to be robocalled. Of course, this 

consent is not real. In our experience as law enforcers and as human 

beings, we don't know many people out there who enjoy getting spam 

calls. 

But nevertheless, these consent farms sell consumers’ personal 

information, also known as leads, to telemarketers, who then believe they 

have free rein to blast consumers with spam calls. It is hard to overstate 

the role that these consent farms play in our country's epidemic of spam 

calls. By obtaining phony consent from millions of consumers and then 

selling these leads to unscrupulous telemarketers, they are fueling fraud 

and opening the door to billions of robocalls. But with the actions being 
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announced today, the FTC and our partners are looking to shut that door 

and lock it. 

Let me start by describing one of our most significant actions, which 

demonstrates how we're moving upstream to target not only telemarketers, 

but also the consent farms that fuel their fraud. One of the largest consent 

farms out there is called Fluent, a publicly traded firm based in New York. 

As detailed in our lawsuit, Fluent and its affiliates use online ads to 

promise a job interview or a free gift card to lure people to its website. 

Once there, consumers would fill in their information to try to get what 

they've been promised: a job or a reward. But in fact, Fluent was tricking 

people into consenting to get robocalls and other marketing solicitations 

from dozens, or even hundreds of marketers. 

You can see in these images how Fluent did that. They buried the consent 

in fine print above the confirmation boxes. That is how in under two years 

Fluent collected and sold more than 620 million telemarketing leads. The 

FTC’s complaint and consent order with Fluent broadly bans the company 

from any future involvement with robocalls, and as part of the settlement 

fluid will pay a $2.5 million civil penalty. 
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But Fluent is hardly alone. Two more FTC cases announced today are 

against Viceroy Media Solutions, another consent farm that gathers and 

sells leads, and Yodel Technologies, a telemarketing company that 

distributed more than 1.4 billion—with a B—calls over about three years. 

Most of those calls use soundboard technology to play pre-recorded audio 

clips that sound like an actual conversation. Going forward, both 

companies will be banned from having any further involvement with 

robocalls. 

Now let's spend a moment on another key vector of illegal calls, VoIP or 

voice over internet protocol. VoIP is how many foreign callers can get 

access to the US telecom system and it's been a real focus of FTC 

enforcement efforts for years. In Hello, hello, Miami, another of the FTC 

cases being announced today, we, along with the Department of Justice, 

have charged the company with transmitting tens of millions of robocalls 

from foreign telemarketers. These callers illegally impersonated Amazon, 

saying your account had been compromised or that your Amazon Prime 

account was about to be renewed. Of course, neither claim was true. 

Let me finally describe a case we're bringing jointly with the United States 

Department of Justice and the Arizona Attorney General's Office against a 
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seller of residential solar panels and its lead generator for illegally placing 

tens of millions of calls to telephone numbers on the National Do Not Call 

Registry. Over 150,000 consumers were called at least 50 times each, and 

over 12,000 consumers were called at least 100 times each. To make 

matters worse, these calls [indiscernible] solar panels by falsely claiming 

an affiliation with the government or the call recipient’s utility company. 

We are grateful to the Department of Justice and the Arizona Attorney 

General for working closely with us to hold these defendants accountable. 

These FTC cases bring up some lessons that I want to underline. First, 

tricking consumers into agreeing to robocalls is not clever, it is not 

innovative. It is illegal. Third party lead generation for robocalls is 

prohibited by the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule. The TSR requires that 

the robocaller itself must get consent directly from the consumer it's 

calling. That's a one to one proposition, not a batch of purchased leads 

with phony consents. I know this is not what lead generators and 

robocallers want to hear, but this is—and it has been—the law. 

Second, soundboard technology is a robocall and FTC enforcement will 

treat it that way. 
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Finally, this is a lesson for point of entry VoIP service providers, those 

providers that help route overseas calls into the US. Take steps to keep 

illegal calls out of the country or the next call you get might be from the 

FTC. 

These lawsuits should send a strong message to robocallers and their 

enablers. But we also have a message for the American public. When it 

comes to stopping the scourge of illegal telemarketing, the FTC is on your 

side. Over the last few years, we've secured judgments of more than $2 

billion against telemarketing scammers and their enablers. We've taken 

bad actors to court and secured permanent bans on their telemarketing 

schemes. We've armed the public with educational resources at 

ftc.gov/calls, where consumers can find free, actionable advice on how to 

block and report unwanted calls. And we've returned millions of dollars to 

consumers affected by these practices. 

I'm pleased to say that these efforts are not in vain. In fact, the number of 

robocall complaints to the FTC fell by almost half between 2021 and 

2022. And we're not done yet. A single unwanted call is one too many and 

we will continue to partner with enforcers across the country to crack 

down on illegal telemarketing. This progress would not be possible 
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without the extraordinary FTC case and investigatory teams who have 

worked up today's cases. And I particularly want to thank Bill Hoder [ph] 

and Valerie Verduce [ph], who have coordinated Operation Stop Scam 

Calls for the FTC. 

And with that, I am pleased to welcome to the podium Arun Rao, Deputy 

Assistant Attorney General for the Consumer Protection Branch of the US 

DOJ, which has been such an outstanding partner of the FTC in our war 

on illegal robocalls. Arun?

Arun Good morning, everybody. And thank you so much, Sam. First of all, it's 

great to be back in Chicago, the city that warmly welcomed my parents as 

immigrants from India many years ago. 

I'm grateful for the opportunity to join the US Department of Justice’s

many partners from across government and across the country to discuss 

our collective efforts to stop scam calls. And I'm pleased to share the stage 

today not only with the FTC, but also with the FCC, as well as 

distinguished representatives of States Attorney Generals’ Offices, 

including Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and Illinois Attorney General 

Kwame Raoul. 
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We are all aware of the significant problems posed, and immense 

frustration caused by scam calls. Like many of you, scam calls have rudely 

interrupted moments that I've been spending with friends and family. And 

we've all heard illegal messages delivered by fraud calls, including some 

that cause the listeners to experience fear, such as when a fraudster 

impersonates a financial institution reporting a purported problem, or 

pretends to be a government agency purportedly on the verge of arresting 

the listener. Scam calls can cause financial devastation, and the full impact 

of frauds and scams can extend even beyond monetary loss suffered by the 

victim. Nearly two-thirds of fraud victims report experiencing stress, 

anxiety, difficulty sleeping and depression. 

Stopping these pernicious calls requires taking a comprehensive approach 

to the problem. We are seeking to bring scam callers to justice through 

both civil actions, including monetary penalties and injunctive relief, and 

criminal prosecutions, meaning prison time. Additionally, government 

enforcement agencies recognize that scam call operations require the 

support of a broad array of actors, including those who assist fraudsters in 

reaching vulnerable consumers by providing lead lists or transmitting 

scam calls using VoIP technology, as Sam discussed a moment ago. Scam 

call operations would not succeed in enriching fraudsters without the 
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participation of those who facilitate the movement of money from victims’ 

bank accounts to fraudsters. 

That same comprehensive approach requires that we work across agencies 

and use all the tools available to us, as the enforcement actions discussed 

today illustrate. The US Department of Justice's Consumer Protection 

Branch works closely with the FTC on efforts to stop scam calls. In May 

of this year we sued XCast Labs, which according to the complaint, 

allegedly facilitated billions of illegal robocalls, including calls that falsely 

claimed an affiliation with the Social Security Administration or pretended 

to be a utility and threatened to cut off service unless the victim made an 

immediate payment. Our close coordination with the FTC also recently 

resulted in a civil resolution with Nexway, a payment processing company 

which allegedly processed payments for technical support scams, 

including some that use deceptive pop up notifications warning that the 

victim's computer had been infected with a virus, and did so to induce the 

victims to pay money. 

The ramifications of making fraud calls are serious and can include 

criminal prosecution. And I want to share a few examples with you. First, 

in a case brought by the Consumer Protection Branch, a defendant was 
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sentenced in March to 65 months in prison for his role in conspiring with 

Peruvian based call centers that defrauded Spanish-speaking US residents 

by falsely threatening them with arrest, deportation and other legal 

consequences. The defendant sentencing followed sentencings for seven 

other call center owner-operators, all of whom had been extradited from 

Peru, and four distribution center operators who processed payments and 

facilitated the fraud in the United States. 

Next, in a case brought by the US Attorney's Office for the District of 

Minnesota, eight defendants in the past year have pleaded guilty in 

connection with their participation in a $300 million scheme involving 

fraudulent magazine sales. And additionally, in a recent criminal 

prosecution that followed an FTC civil action, the US Attorney's Office 

for the Southern District of New York secured a 78-month sentence for a 

defendant who used telemarketers to target consumers with credit card 

debt. Thousands of customers of the defendant complained about fraud 

and the use of deceptive tactics. 

Facilitators of scam calls also face substantial prison time. For example, 

last year the US Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona secured a 

160-month prison term for an individual who distributed lead lists 
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containing the personal information of thousands of older adults to 

fraudsters, enabling those fraudsters to target the older adults as part of a 

lottery scam. And in a case brought by the Consumer Protection Branch in 

the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California, a 

defendant was sentenced to 108 months in prison for facilitating a 

grandparent scam, in which fraudsters contacted elderly Americans and 

impersonated a grandchild, other close relative or friend of the victim. The 

fraudsters falsely convinced the victims that their relatives or friends were 

in legal trouble and needed money to pay for bail for medical expenses for 

car accident victims, or to prevent additional charges from being filed. The 

defendant in this case was responsible for directing a network of 

individuals who received and forwarded victim funds and personally 

picked up cash from victims. 

Finally, a key part of our comprehensive strategy is consumer awareness 

and education. Everyone should learn the science of scam calls and how to 

stop them. Most importantly, please report scam calls to law enforcement. 

None of the cases we've discussed today could have been brought without 

members of the public sharing their experiences with law enforcement. 
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Thank you, again, to the FTC for coordinating this event and for hosting 

us this morning and to all of the agencies participating in this week for 

your partnership in this effort. I look forward to continuing to work with 

all of you as part of our collective efforts to combat scam calls. Thank 

you. 

Samuel Thank you, Arun. And let me now turn things over to Loyaan Egal, Chief 

of the Enforcement Bureau at the Federal Communications Commission. 

Loyaan Thanks, Sam. Good morning, everyone. Again, I’m Loyaan Egal, chief 

of enforcement at the FCC. I want to thank Director Levine and the 

Chicago and Atlanta field offices from the FTC for putting together and 

coordinating this event. I’d like to thank our partners at the US 

Department of Justice, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Rao, Attorney 

General Yost from Ohio and Attorney General Raoul from Illinois. Thank 

you very much. 

We, too, are very pleased to participate in this event today with our 

partners. The FCC has the primary regulatory role with regards to 

implementing the rules coming out of the STIR/SHAKEN statute. And as 

a result of that, we provide the rules and regulations dealing with call 
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blocking and other obligations that voice service providers have to follow 

to police their networks for illegal robocalls. This includes working with 

the private sector in selecting the organization that handles the efforts to 

trace back the origin of successive suspected illegal calls. 

We've employed two primary enforcement methods in combating these 

illegal robocalls. First, the FCC has employed its injunctive authorities 

looking at requiring originating and gateway providers who are facilitating 

calls to block or effectively mitigate suspected illegal calls after they've 

been notified that they are transmitting this illegal traffic. We've issued 

nearly 20 cease and desist letters between 2022 and 2023 against bad 

actors that are carrying unlawful traffic. Our letters are swift, and have 

been very effective, in that if the companies have failed to respond to 

those letters, we then have taken steps to order other providers to block 

those calls. 

An example of that is an effort that we did in coordination with our 

partners at the Ohio Attorney General's Office involving a company and 

related companies named Sumco Panama that had been responsible for 

placing over 5 billion unlawful calls related to auto warranties. And in 

July of 2022, last year, we sent cease and desist letters to multiple entities 
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within that enterprise, and then authorized downstream providers to block 

that traffic when those entities failed to mitigate those unlawful calls. This 

resulted in a 99% drop in auto warranty robocalls. 

We also applied the same effort and approach with regards to illegal calls 

related to student loans. We identified a company named Urth Access that 

was responsible for originating millions of illegal robocall campaigns 

related to student loan debt relief. And after we took our action, we saw 

that there was a result in an 89% drop in illegal calls related to student 

loan robocalls. 

We've also told the industry that it needs to employ and implement Know 

Your Customer principles, meaning providers need to know whose traffic 

they're carrying and whether or not that traffic is facilitating illegal 

robocalls. In addition, we've also taken actions to remove companies from 

the robocall mitigation database. The FCC requires that all providers of 

telecom services certify in the robocall mitigation database that they have 

the mechanisms in place to prevent originating illegal robocalls. And if 

they do not, we've taken action to remove them from that database. 
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We've also brought some of the largest fines in the FTC’s history against 

robocall facilitators, including the aforementioned company I mentioned, 

Sumco Panama, where we brought approximately $300 million proposed 

fines against them for placing over, again, 5 billion unlawful robocalls 

related to auto warranties. 

In addition to taking those enforcement actions and approaches, we've 

worked really hard and successfully to enter into approximately 45 

memorandums of understanding with our partners at the state level. We 

have also had a long-standing cooperation agreement with our partners at 

the FTC and worked very closely with them in bringing enforcement 

actions in the space. And we've worked with our partners at the 

Department of Justice to see what other enforcement actions we can bring 

in a coordinated fashion. 

Lastly, looking forward, we are looking at the FCC to expand our 

investigations to identify and expose the financial networks and businesses 

that are supporting and benefiting from this illegal conduct. We're also 

working with mobile phone device makers and software operating system 

companies to better understand issues and develop effective approaches 

for dealing with text messages, as we're seeing an influx move from 
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robocalls to text. And we're continuing to build our partnerships with our 

law enforcement partners at the federal, state and international level to 

deal with this on a coordinated enforcement effort. Thank you. 

Samuel It’s now my honor to introduce Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost.

Dave Thank you, Sam. The Attorney General of Ohio gets robocalls. It really is 

a universal plague. And I'm pleased to be here with so many colleagues, 

partners in this fight. The fight is for all of you who are tired of having 

your phones used as a way to hijack your time and your attention, to 

hound and harass you, people in Ohio, that we know their names, these 

aren't statistics, Peter in Norwood, Ohio who endured at least 44 separate 

deceptive calls from a telemarketer trying to sell him an extended 

warranty for his car; or Jake Bass [ph] in Springfield, Ohio, who was hit 

with 39 unwanted calls; Lisa in Canal Winchester 25 calls. This is for 

everybody who's tired of having your phone number sold to people you 

don't know and without your permission. 

Your phone should be a convenience, not a curse; a tool, not a tribulation. 

And yet, we have more than 30 million illegal robocalls in America every 

day. About $30 billion are ripped off by these scammers each year. Listen, 
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robocallers are like a plague of locusts using modern day technology to 

swarm through the international telecommunications landscape, deceiving, 

scamming, defrauding thousands of our constituents every single day. 

They strike like locusts in overwhelming numbers, cross borders and 

jurisdictions with impunity, they pillage and they consume everything they 

can and then vanish into the digital frontier. This invasion is too big for 

any single jurisdiction. You've heard the word “partner” a lot today and 

people saying thank you to our partners, I concur with those thanks. And 

you won't hear a Republican state official say this too often, but I'm 

grateful for our federal partners in banding together to fight against this 

bipartisan, universal pestilence. 

We're also excited about, in particular, the use of enforcement powers 

against the VoIPs. They are the bottlenecks by which these international 

predators are getting into America. We may not be able to track down the 

flat in Serbia where they're running the computer with the automated 

dialer, but we can track down how they're getting into the American 

telecom system. We're going to continue this effort until everyone knows, 

don't try it in America. Thank you very much. 
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Samuel Thank you, General Yost. And it's now my honor to introduce General 

Kwame Raoul from the state of Illinois.

Kwame Thank you. Good morning, and you're going to hear the word partner one 

more time, because I truly value the partnership with the FTC, the DOJ 

and FCC and my friend and colleague, General Yost, who has been a 

leader in gathering us for efforts to try to combat the annoyance of 

robocalls and the extent to which they prey on consumers within our 

respective states and every geographic area of our respective states. And 

just like General Yost, it includes me as well. And I'm more than annoyed. 

And so that's why it's a great pleasure to be able to collaborate on this 

effort with this nationwide sweep, because addressing robocalls and 

holding bad actors accountable demands a collaborative approach. 

As it's been said, robocall scammers are difficult to track down because 

they use technology to hide their identities and evade detection. A single 

call could travel through dozens of carriers before reaching your phone. 

But this can also provide opportunities for legitimate providers in the 

network to stop suspicious call traffic. Telephone providers that initiate or 

pass through calls have a responsibility to use available technology and 

tools to detect illegal robocall traffic and cut it off. 
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As AGs under General Yost’s leadership, we’re part of a bipartisan 

robocall technologies working group that came together with a group of 

telecom providers to develop a set of principles to do just that: identify 

and stop call traffic that appears to be illegal telemarketing traffic. Our 

goal is that telecom providers commit to, as has been said, knowing your 

customer, knowing the traffic, participating in highly technical call 

authentication efforts, cooperating with law enforcement by participating 

in trace back efforts and providing free call blocking. Our working group 

is tackling illegal telemarketing calls by participating in a rule making 

process by offering comment to the FTC. 

Just as we are partnering with the FTC today for Operation Stop Scam 

Calls, my office was proud to join the FTC in Operation Call it Quits in 

2019. I and my office, we are collectively committed to continuing to 

work with law enforcement partners at the state and federal level, which 

will help us chip away at the illegal telemarketing calls and get this 

annoyance out the way for every constituent we have in all of our 

respective states. Thank you. 

Todd Thanks to all of our speakers. We really appreciate you all being here 

today. We’ll now take questions from those of you in the room. And just a 
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reminder to please keep your questions focused on today's topic. And we 

will only be taking questions from members of the press, so please 

identify yourself and your organization when posing a question, 

Jason I’m Jason Knowles from ABC 7 in Chicago. If you can kind of sum up the 

overall initiative, like how many settlements, how many lawsuits and what 

exactly is being done for the crackdown? 

Samuel Certainly. This is a really comprehensive effort. This involves more than 

102 participants, more than 180 enforcement actions and we’re securing

all kinds of relief against telemarketers and their enablers, depending on 

the conduct. You heard from Arun Rao on how we've secured criminal 

penalties against some of these actors. We've secured civil penalties 

against some of these actors. We've secured permanent injunctions barring 

them from the robocall business, and more. So you can look at our 

website, see the whole host of actions that we're announcing today. But 

this is really a comprehensive crackdown, as I said, not only on 

telemarketers, but those like VoIP providers and consent farms who make 

their fraud possible. 
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W Yes, [indiscernible]. I would like to know if these expand the 

investigation to track also text messages? 

Samuel That's an excellent question. This announcement is focused on robocalls, 

but there's no question that there's been a whole scourge of robotext 

messages that are often deceptive. I want to be very clear, under the FTC 

act it is illegal to deceive people through text messages. And we're 

prepared to hold those actors accountable. Moreover, what we often see in 

texting is people trying to impersonate the government, people trying to 

impersonate companies like Amazon and UPS, and we've actually 

proposed a nationwide ban on impersonation fraud that would apply to the 

dissemination of these text messages and allow us to get stiffer penalties 

against those who engage in these practices. So we're very much focused 

on robotext messages as well. This action is focused on robocalls. 

Loyaan, do you want to add anything to that from the FCC perspective? 

Loyaan Yes, just really quick. I think for us, as I mentioned, we are working with 

the phone device makers, the Apples, the Googles, to better understand the 

technology so that we could focus our enforcement authorities, which 

right now are limited with regards to text messages. But we're focusing on 
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very specific areas that we can do the success that we've had with 

robocalls and apply it to robotexts. 

Todd Other questions from those in the room? Okay. Operator, are there 

questions from reporters on the conference line? 

Moderator [Operator instructions]. Our first question is from Kathleen Murphy with 

FTC Watch. Please go ahead.

Kathleen Hello, it's Kathleen Murphy with FTC Watch. Thanks very much for this 

conversation and for taking my question today. 

I'm interested especially in hearing from Attorney General Yost, and thank 

you for answering. You described the robocalls as a plague, and your 

fellow Republicans in the House Appropriations Committee just voted last 

week to decrease Federal Trade Commission funding, it's about $53.5 

million below last year's levels, and Democrats were saying during the 

markup that it's not our place to sell out our seniors and consumers related 

to robocalls. Do you have a comment on what the Congress is doing with 

the FTC spending? 
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Dave Well, I'm not, thankfully, a member of Congress. And candidly, this is the 

first I've heard about that debate. I would not be supportive of that. And I 

think this is a bipartisan issue that Democrats and Republicans should 

want to see our laws at the state and federal law enforced by people who 

are, candidly, victimizing the least able to protect themselves. So I 

suppose that there are always budget for priorities, and that's what 

Congress gets paid to do, but speaking for this Attorney General, I don't 

support a budget cut that’s going to impact our ability to enforce the law. 

Kathleen Thank you. 

Todd Operator, are there other questions on the line? 

Moderator Yes, we will go to a question from Misty Stiver from WOIO TV. Please 

go ahead. 

Misty Hello, good morning. I'm with 19 News in Cleveland, Ohio. My question 

is really for anybody, I guess, that might be best with the answer. Are 

these companies going to be able to pay these multimillion dollar fines 

that have been issued? And then once they are, if they are, where would 

that money go? 
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Samuel I can answer that. The question was, are these companies going to be able 

to pay the penalties that have been issued? This is Sam Levine from the 

FTC. So the answer is mixed. As I mentioned, there are more than 180 

cases involved in this announcement; some of the defendants are able to 

pay, some of them are not. And what we've done is we've gotten what are 

called suspended judgments, meaning that if we discover those defendants 

do have the ability to pay, we're going to collect that money. And some of 

the defendants are paying in full. And I'll give you a few examples, Fluent, 

a publicly traded company is going to be paying $2.5 million. Yodel 

Technologies is going to be paying $400,000 and is also subject to a $1 

million civil penalty. 

So it's mixed. But our real goal is to hold these companies accountable and 

send a strong message to others in this space, that if they engage in similar 

practices, they're going to have to pay a penalty too. 

You also asked where this money is going. For the cases that settled today, 

at least by the FTC, these are civil penalties that go to the US Treasury. 

For the cases that are in litigation, often litigated by the DOJ, we are 

seeking both, in many of them, civil penalties and redress for consumers. 
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Misty Thank you very much. 

Moderator Next, we go to Sabrina Franza with CBS Chicago. Please go ahead. 

Sabrina Good morning. My question is in regards to how much more advanced 

this could get in the next coming years and months. I know we're seeing 

AI introduced in a lot of scams. I haven't heard you speak about that today 

in regards to robocalls. But in the way that things will likely advance as 

robocalls, robotexts get even more deceptive, what is the plan to make 

sure that we're adjusting for that new technology as we start seeing it and 

as we start seeing these calls and texts being even more realistic? 

Samuel And the question is, how are we grappling with the emergence of AI and 

in particular, I suspect the caller is asking about voice cloning technology? 

I want to be very clear, if bad actors are using voice cloning technology to 

deceive the American public, it is illegal under the FTC act and we will 

hold them accountable, just as we're holding the accountable the entities 

announced today. If they're using voice cloning to make calls, we’ll hold 

them accountable under the telemarketing sales rule. If they're using other 

technologies to deceive people, we’ll hold them accountable under the 
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FTC act. I recognize that this is new technology, but the same old laws 

apply and we're prepared to use them. 

Do any others want to jump in? 

Moderator Are you ready for the next question? 

Todd Yes, we are.

Moderator We will move to John Bedell from WHIO TV. Please go ahead. 

John Hi, there. My question is for Mr. Egal with the FCC. Earlier this year, the 

FCC released a public notice ordering phone carriers to block calls from 

MV Realty, that's a company that AG Yost and several others are actively 

suing. The allegation from the SEC was that MV placed substantial 

amounts of apparently unlawful phone calls to numbers on the Do Not 

Call Registry. What's the expectation from the phone carriers when you 

issue those, and what's the response from these phone carriers in regards to 

MV Realty with this public notice? 
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Loyaan Thank you. This is Loyaan Egal from the FCC. You're correct. We 

brought, using again, as I mentioned earlier, our injunctive authorities 

against the companies that were carrying MV Realty’s traffic. Those 

companies were PhoneBurner, which was the intermediary platform that 

MV Realty was using to transmit these calls, and then Twilio, whose 

network PhoneBurner was using to disseminate those calls. We issued a 

cease and desist letter to Twilio, and we also issued what we call our N5

authority with regards to PhoneBurner. After issuing those notices, those 

calls ceased. And so at this at this juncture, we are not aware of any 

further calls involving MV Realty. But we are watching those and 

monitoring it closely, and we're also looking at our partners as they're 

bringing their state enforcement actions against MV Realty. Thank you. 

Moderator And next we go back to Christopher Brooks with CBS News. Please go 

ahead.

Christopher Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thanks for putting this together. I'm going to 

make an assumption with my question, and please correct me if I'm 

wrong. But these consent forms that we're cracking down on right now, 

I'm assuming they existed before today, probably before this year, so my 

question is, is this the first time you guys have done these legal actions 
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specifically targeting these consent farms? Or have we done these before? 

Is this a new approach just looking at these consent forms and their 

existence? Because I don't know how long they've been around and how 

long you guys have actually looked at targeting them, other than what 

you're talking about today. 

Samuel Sure. This is Sam Levine from the FTC. And the question was about 

consent forms and whether this is a new approach. Now, I want to be 

clear, it has long been the law under the Telemarketing Sales Rule that the 

practices of these consent farms, that is third parties tricking people into 

turning over their personal information and tricking people into consenting 

to robocalls, is not legal. It has long been the law under the Telemarketing 

Sales Rule, as I said, that robocallers need to get direct consent from the 

consumers whom they wish to call. 

That said, today's action is shining a bright spotlight on the existence of 

this problem. Candidly, the fact that publicly traded companies like 

Fluent, as well as some of the other companies engaged in the sweep,

suggest to us that this remains a very big problem in spite of this having 

been the law for many years. So we are sending a strong message to other 

consent farms out there, your practices are against the law and you will 
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face similar consequences to what Fluent faced if you continue to engage 

in the illegal deployment of consent farms to facilitate robocalls.

Moderator And we have no other phone line questions. You may continue. 

Todd Okay, thanks so much. We appreciate all of you for joining us, both in 

person and on the telephone. If you have other questions, we will be 

available after the press conference. Our press officer, Mitch Katz, is also 

available. His email address is mkatz@ftc.gov. Thank you very much for 

joining us. 

Moderator Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your conference for today. 

Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.