Robocall
One of the calls was to the toll-free number used by customers of 2call.ca, a subsidiary of Edmonton-based Internet Service Provider RackNine, to phone in and record their outgoing messages.
This burner phone initiated a series of automated robocalls mostly in Guelph but with a few dozen in other ridings, that targeted mostly non-Conservative voters with false voting location changes.
[citation needed] In November 2011, the investigator served RackNine with a production order for records and had the account holder associated with the bogus calls quickly identified.
[9] Elections Canada has made a statement[10] and reported to Parliament,[11] that the fraud was extensive, affecting 200 ridings in all ten provinces plus Yukon Territory.
[12] The Council of Canadians, a left of centre activist group, has asserted that the robocalls may have been enough to swing the result by 4%, enough to win a number of ridings in very close races.
[27] In 2015, government debt collection was exempted from the 1991 robocall restrictions; however, the Supreme Court invalidated this exception on July 6, 2020 in Barr v. American Assn.
[29][30] The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations prohibit anyone (including charities, politicians and political parties) from making robocalls to cell phone numbers without the recipients' prior consent.
[33] In September 2008, then-Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon alerted political campaigns in Missouri that his office would aggressively enforce federal rules (Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991) requiring calls to include identifying and contact information.
[43] Voters and watchdog groups complained that it was a turnout-suppression effort, and the state Attorney General Roy Cooper ordered them to stop making the calls.
[44] The automated opinion polling system asked whether U.S. Speaker Nancy Pelosi should be invited to campaign with six Democratic candidates for the South Carolina Legislature.
[47] After the charges were dropped, Cahaly filed a suit against state officials, claiming his constitutional right to free speech had been violated.
U.S. district court judge, Michelle Childs ruled that South Carolina's anti-robocall statute was a content-based restriction on speech and therefore unconstitutional.
[51] Shaun Dakin, CEO of Citizens for Civil Discourse, testified at the hearing and described how robocalls affect the lives of voters across the nation.
[52] Dakin, a former John Kerry campaign worker,[53] set up a website called Stoppoliticalcalls.org and claimed to allow citizens to opt out of receiving robocalls.
[50][58] Despite heavy media publicity of the database, only seven politicians in the United States voluntarily pledged to respect the list during the 2008 general election cycle.
Beginning in July 2022, the Federal Communications Commission ordered telecom providers to cease carrying calls from the Sumco Panama Company.
[68][69] In the UK BT operates a service for landlines called Choose to Refuse which allows customers to block up to 10 phone numbers of their choice for a monthly fee.
[71] Newer devices for landlines can use cloud based data to resolve the hard coded blacklist issues and allow the creation of a personal whitelist/blacklist.
Based on a database developed from customer feedback, it filters suspected telemarketing calls to a system which challenges callers to record their name after pressing a button.
[75] A major problem for the use of both blacklisting and whitelisting techniques is the practice of caller ID spoofing,[76] which is prevalent as a result of the low barrier to entry in the VoIP services market.
[77] In 2015 the Federal Communications Commission proposed a framework for the telecommunications industry in the United States, which included a validation system at network level for robocalls from SIP sources by 2017.
In 2016, both Verizon[79] and Sprint each launched their own service based on Enhanced Caller ID, which is developed by Cequint and incorporates whitelisting, blacklisting and crowdsourcing techniques.
[89] The FTC took action against both the promoter of the phony extended auto warranties, as well as the telemarketing company that it hired to carry out its illegal, deceptive campaign.
The FTC contends that the companies are operating a massive telemarketing scheme that uses random, pre-recorded phone calls to deceive consumers into thinking that their vehicle's warranty is about to expire.
Consumers who respond to the robocalls are pressured to purchase extended service contracts for their vehicles, which the telemarketers falsely portray as an extension of the manufacturer's original warranty.
The seller of extended auto warranties sued by the FTC allegedly took in more than $10 million on the sale of these deceptively marketed service contracts.
Some of the defendants used offshore shell corporations to try to avoid scrutiny, and a top officer in the telemarketing company bragged to prospective clients that he could operate outside the law without any chance of being caught by the FTC, the papers stated.
The FTC alleged in its complaints that the calls were part of a deceptive scheme and asked the court to assure the assets will not be lost in case they might be needed to repay consumers who have been victimized.
The Commission issued a package of declaratory rulings in June 2015 that clarified the provisions of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) that deal with prerecorded and artificial voice calls received by residential wireline phones as well as wireless numbers.
[92][93] In 2021 the Federal Communications Commission ("FCC") released an order imposing strict limits on the number of non-telemarketing, prerecorded or artificial voice calls that can be made to residential phone lines without prior consent.
