Federal Communications Commission	FCC 20-74


STATEMENT OF
COMMISSIONER BRENDAN CARR

Re:	John C. Spiller; Jakob A. Mears; Rising Eagle Capital Group LLC; JSquared Telecom LLC; Only Web Leads LLC; Rising Phoenix Group; Rising Phoenix Holdings; RPG Leads; and Rising Eagle Capital Group – Cayman, File No.:  EB-TCD-18-00027781.

Illegal robocalls are the FCC’s top consumer complaint.  And for good reason.  They’re not only annoying and disruptive, fraudsters bombard Americans with these calls to steal their money.  That is why I’m glad that this FCC elevated robocalls to our top enforcement priority.

Since many of those placing these illegal calls operate overseas, we issued new rules to crack down on international robocalls and have begun working with international partners to trace them back and shut them down.  We authorized carriers to block calls that they believe are part of illegal robocalling schemes, just like Gmail blocks your spam.  And while industry is in the best position to develop network-based solutions, we have pushed the industry to move quickly on implementing solutions like STIR/SHAKEN, which can prevent fraudsters from spoofing phone numbers.  

Our enforcement action today represents a major win for the industry-led approach.  A consortium of telecom companies called the Industry Traceback Group used its members’ data to identify the origin of these apparent scam calls, and it then passed that information over to our enforcement staff.  The conduct at issue in this case appears particularly troublesome, as it was not merely about annoying calls interrupting dinner.  The calls in this case appear designed to defraud Americans on health insurance. 

So I want to thank the staff of the Enforcement Bureau, the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau, and the Wireline Competition Bureau – as well as the Industry Traceback Group – for their hard work on this item.  It has my support.  

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