Source: filo / Getty
A Texas phone company, Articul8, and its owner, Paul K. Talbot, are being sued by North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein. According to Stein, Articul8 allegedly violated the Telemarketing Sales Rule and facilitated illegal and fraudulent telemarketing calls and robocalls. The State Attorney General said that during a few months in 2020 and 2021, the telephone company routed more than sixty-five million calls to phone numbers in his state. He says that some citizens received between fifty and two hundred calls on the same day. Stein said, “the only way telemarketers can inundate our phones with robocalls is with the complicity of gateway phone companies.” The lawsuit accuses Articul8 of knowingly allowing domestic and international scammers to route scam calls to millions of people in the US since 2015. The calls included scams representing: government imposters, auto warranty representatives, computer security representatives, Amazon imposters, and monthly bill collectors. Stein even accused one scam call of attacking a hospital emergency room. Scammers earn money by misleading people and Actcul8 made money by allowing the calls to the US telephone network. Calls were made to numbers on the Do Not Call Registry and by using spoofed numbers connected to state and local police departments, the FBI, and the Social Security Administration. A bipartisan group of fifty-one attorneys general, including Stein, asked the Federal Communications Commission in January to implement measures that would block the large amount of foreign illegal calls through US telephone companies.
