CHICAGO (WMBD) — Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul filed a lawsuit Tuesday, alongside 48 attorneys general, against Avid Telecom, its owner Michael Lansky and vice-president Stacey S. Reeves, for alleged violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule and other federal and state telemarketing and consumer laws.
The suit alleges Avid Telecom allegedly initiated, facilitated, and transmitted more than 7.5 billion illegal robocalls to millions of people on the National Do Not Call Registry. And, Raoul’s office alleges that between December 2018 and January 2023, more than 290 million of those calls were to Illinois residents.
Avid Telecom is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service provider that sells data, phone numbers and dialing software to help its customers make mass robocalls. It also serves as an intermediate provider and allegedly facilitated or helped route illegal robocalls across the country, according to the suit and to Raoul’s office.
Between December 2018 and January 2023, Avid helped make hundreds of millions of calls using spoofed or invalid caller ID numbers, including more than 8.4 million calls that appeared to be coming from government and law enforcement agencies and private companies, according to the suit.
Avid Telecom allegedly sent or transmitted scam calls about Social Security Administration scams, Medicare scams, auto warranty scams, Amazon scams, DirecTV scams, credit card interest rate reduction scams and employment scams.
The legal action arises from the nationwide Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force Raoul joined in August 2022 along with 50 bipartisan attorneys general. The task force is investigating and taking legal action against those responsible for routing significant volumes of illegal robocall traffic into and across the nation.
The Federal Trade Commission and the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General provided investigative assistance in this matter.
