RICHMOND, Va. (WRIC) – Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares announced on Tuesday that he filed a complaint against the leaders of Avid Telecom for allegedly facilitating billions of illegal robocalls and violating federal and state telemarketing and consumer laws for just over fours years.
Avid Telecom sells data, phone numbers and dialing software in order to help its customers make mass robocalls. It also allegedly helped to send, transmit and route more than 24.5 billion calls between December 2018 and January 2023. Over 90% of these calls lasted less than 15 seconds, which indicates they were likely robocalls.
The complaint allegedly that many of the calls sent or transmitted by Avid Telecom were blatant scams, including Social Security Administration and Medicare scams.
The Industry Traceback Group reportedly sent at least 329 notifications to Avid Telecom to inform the company it was transmitting these scam calls, but Avid Telecom did not stop.
In August, Miyares joined the nationwide Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force, which investigated companies that were responsible for routing significant volumes of illegal robocalls across the United States.
According to Miyares, Avid Telecom routed nearly 235 million calls to numbers with Virginia area codes and spoofed Caller ID numbers from federal, state, and local law police.
“Avid Telecom refuses to stop their robocalls, despite receiving over three hundred warnings,” Miyares said. “It’s obvious that the only way to get this organization to stop harassing Virginians is by taking them to court, and holding them accountable.”
Miyares was joined by 49 other Attorneys General in the complaint.
Federal Trade Commission and the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General also contributed to investigations into Avid Telecom and illegal robocalls.
