Stop if you heard this one before: “We’ve been trying to reach you about your car’s extended warranty.” Well, if the Federal Communications Commission gets its way, we might never hear an annoying robot voice repeat that sentence ever again.
The New York Post reports the FCC has tracked down two California men who helped circulate those annoying robocalls and is planning on hitting them with a whopping $300 million fine.
The FCC accused Michael Aaron Jones and Roy Cox Jr. of launching the car warranty robocall campaign and using their company Sumco Panama, as well as other entities, to spread it. The men are said to have managed to make over 5 billion illegal robocalls during a span of three months in 2021.
The FCC says the pair are accused of “using pre-recorded voice calls to press consumers to speak to a ‘warranty specialist’ about extending or reinstating their car’s warranty.”
Said FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Loyaan A. Egal, “We will be relentless in pursing the groups behind these schemes by limiting their access to U.S. communications networks and holding them to account for their conduct.”
This isn’t the first time this duo has been responsible for annoying robocalls. They were previously banned by the Federal Trade Commission from making such calls.
Jones, among others, was cited by a California judge in 2017 for “running an operation that blasted consumers with billions of illegal telemarketing robocalls.” Jones was banned from making the calls ever again and was slapped with a $2.7 million fine.
And since he apparently did not learn his lesson, he now might have to cough up $300 million.