Attorney General Gentner Drummond announced Phase 2 of Operation Robocall Roundup today, expanding the crackdown on illegal robocalls to include four of the largest voice providers in the country.
As part of the ongoing investigation, Drummond and the Anti-Robocall Multistate Litigation Task Force has directed Inteliquent, Bandwidth, Lumen and Peerless to stop transmitting suspected illegal robocalls across their networks.
“These phone companies have been warned to follow the rules and stop allowing fraudsters to harass and scam hardworking Oklahomans,” Drummond said. “The ridiculous flood of illegal robocalls in Oklahoma and around the country must come to an end.”
In August, Drummond sent warning letters to 37 smaller voice providers that were allowing suspected illegal robocalls onto the U.S. telephone network. This next phase targets companies with far larger footprints in the U.S. telecom ecosystem. The four companies are continuing to transmit hundreds of thousands – and in some cases, millions – of suspected illegal robocalls.
As larger providers, these companies have a heightened responsibility to decline call traffic from known and repeat bad actors, Drummond said. Despite extensive industry traceback notices and years of documented warnings, these four providers continue to route suspected illegal robocalls onto the network and into American homes.
After sending warning letters in August, the Task Force saw rapid, measurable changes:
– 13 companies were removed from the FCC’s Robocall Mitigation Database, meaning no provider in the United States may accept their call traffic.
– 19 companies stopped appearing in any traceback results, indicating they ceased routing suspected illegal robocalls.
– At least four providers terminated high-risk customer accounts identified as transmitting illegal traffic.
In 2022, Drummond and 50 other attorneys general joined forces to create the Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force. The Task Force investigates and takes legal action against companies responsible for significant volumes of illegal and fraudulent robocall traffic routed into and across the United States.
The above chart shows the scale of suspected illegal robocall activity linked to each company. The first column reflects how many traceback notices each company has received since 2019. A traceback notice is an official alert from industry investigators indicating that a company transmitted a call tied to a suspected illegal robocall campaign. The next two columns estimate the major scam categories – such as fake Amazon, Apple, Social Security, or IRS calls – that moved through each company’s network. Together, the data shows both the specific types of scams these companies helped transmit and the staggering volume of robocalls flowing across their systems.
