In an ongoing battle against the scourge of robocalls, Tennessee's Attorney General, Jonathan Skrmetti, has ushered in Phase 2 of Operation Robocall Roundup. This phase sees the grappling intensified, bringing under scrutiny four titanic telecommunications companies: Inteliquent, Bandwidth, Lumen, and Peerless. These companies, according to the Tennessee Attorney General's office, have allegedly let through an astronomical figure of around 3.4 billion potential scam calls, with their networks serving as the nation's backbone.
As reported by the Tennessee Attorney General's office, "These aren’t small players. They are some of the largest telecom companies that form the backbone of America’s phone network," Skrmetti emphasized in his remarks. Given years of warnings and substantial industry notices, they have yet to halt the stream of suspected illegal robocalls making their way into millions of American homes.
Inteliquent alone has received 9,712 traceback notices since 2019, with 450 million calls impersonating Amazon or Apple, and a burdensome 1.425 billion mimicking SSA or IRS communications. Its peers, Bandwidth, Peerless, and Lumen, have similarly harrowing figures to their names, with hundreds of millions of sketchy calls associated with each.
Phase 1 of the crackdown has yielded measurable results. Thirteen companies were removed from the FCC’s Robocall Mitigation Database, 19 are no longer appearing in traceback reports, and at least four providers have disconnected customer accounts tied to illegal traffic, as per the Tennessee Attorney General's office. The actions come under the supervision of the Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force, established in 2022 by a coalition of 51 state attorneys general.
