From WZTV in Nashville: Tennessee's attorney general has sued Avid Telecom for making millions of illegal robocalls to Tennesseans between 2018 an
From WZTV in Nashville: Tennessee’s attorney general has sued Avid Telecom for making millions of illegal robocalls to Tennesseans between 2018 and 2023.
AG Jonathan Skrmetti announced Tuesday that he was suing Michael D. Lansky, LLC, which does business under the name Avid Telecom, for violating state and federal telemarketing and consumer laws.
According to Skrmetti, between December 2018 and January 2023, Avid Telecom transmitted more than 7.5 billion calls to numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry. About 200 million of those calls were made to numbers in Tennessee.
“Everybody hates robocalls, especially when they are used to take advantage of our most vulnerable citizens,” General Skrmetti said. “I appreciate the efforts of this bipartisan group to stop this relentless annoyance and protect Tennesseans from exploitive interruptions.”
Additional evidence against Avid includes the fact that of the 24.5 million calls they transmitted during these months, 90% of them lasted 15 seconds or less. This is considered an indicator of a potential robocall.
In addition to this, Avid also helped make hundreds of millions of calls using fake or invalid caller ID numbers. 8.4 million of these calls appeared to be coming from government or law enforcement agencies. Some even looked like they were coming from private companies.
These alleged scam calls included scams related to the Social Security Administration, Medicare, Amazon, DirecTV, and credit card rate reduction.
Tennessee’s AG was joined in filing this complaint by attorneys general from 47 other states and the District of Columbia.
