49 Attorneys General Sue Telecom Company, Allege Billions of Robocalls, Attempted Scam Calls

Attorneys general in 48 states and the District of Columbia jointly announced a lawsuit Tuesday against a telecommunications company they accuse of making more than 24 billion robocalls and attempted scam calls over a four-year span.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona against Tucson-based Avid Telecom, alleges that the company sent or attempted to send more than 24.5 billion calls to customers between December 2018 and Januar 2023, with more than 90 percent lasting fewer than 15 seconds, an indicator that they were likely robocalls, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said.

The lawsuit also alleges that Avid received at least 329 notifications from the United States Telecom Association’s Industry Traceback Group that the company was transmitting robocalls, indicating that Avid allegedly did little to screen the call traffic it carried.

Many of the calls included Social Security, Medicare and employment scams, the lawsuit alleges, and more than 7.5 billion targeted phone numbers are on the National Do Not Call Registry. Nearly 600 million of those were to numbers in California alone, Bonta said in an announcement of the lawsuit.

The lawsuit alleges that Avid violated federal laws prohibiting the use of automatic dialing systems, artificial or prerecorded voices in phone calls, deceptive practices by telemarketers and the transmission of inaccurate caller-ID information.

A 2022 report on scam robocalls from the National Consumer Law Center and the Electronic Privacy Information Center found that more than 33 million scam robocalls are made to American phone numbers every day.

The report also found that nearly 60 million Americans lost upwards of $29 billion to scam robocallers in 2021 alone.

“In addition to being a daily annoyance, robocalls can and do cause real financial damage,” Bonta said in a statement.

Avid Telecom did not respond to a request for comment. The attorneys general of South Dakota and Alaska are the only two state-level prosecutors not involved in the lawsuit.