OKLAHOMA CITY – A federal district judge in Arizona denied multiple attempts to dismiss and delay a bipartisan lawsuit 49 state attorneys general filed against Avid Telecom, its owner and its vice president.
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond and 48 other attorneys general sued the company in May 2023 for initiating and facilitating billions of illegal robocalls to millions of people across the nation.
Avid Telecom, owned by Michael Lansky, sent or transmitted more than 7.5 billion calls to telephone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry between December 2018 and January 2023; approximately 101 million of those calls were to numbers in Oklahoma.
The company continued transmitting the calls even after being notified at least 329 times by the USTelecom-led Industry Traceback Group that the illegal robocalls were being sent across their networks.
“Avid Telecom needs to be held accountable for its ceaseless attempts to intentionally scam Oklahomans and for knowingly violating a host of federal and state telemarketing and consumer laws,” Drummond said. “Scam robocalls are a nuisance and oftentimes cause financial harm to Oklahomans,” he added.
Avid Telecom is a Voice over Internet Protocol service provider that sells data, phone numbers, dialing software, and/or expertise to help its customers make mass robocalls.
It also serves as an intermediate provider and allegedly facilitated or helped route more than 24 billion 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 – during a four-year period. More than 90% of those calls lasted less than 15 seconds, which indicates they were likely robocalls.
“VoIP providers use robocalling technology that allows for the transmission of high call volumes in short durations. A robocaller can make multiple calls in a single second,” the presiding judge wrote in her 35-page order dated May 8.
Further, 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, as well as private companies.
The lawsuit contends Avid Telecom and its principal officers facilitated billions of illegal robocalls and violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the Telemarketing Sales Rule, and other federal and state telemarketing and consumer laws.