A health insurance marketing company is facing more than $82 million in fines for allegedly placing more than 21 million illegal automated calls.
According to the FCC, Philip Roesel, who owns a company called Best Insurance Contracts (doing business as Wilmington Insurance Quotes), is alleged to have made millions of robocalls to market health insurance. The FCC also alleges that Roesel falsified his caller ID information to hide the actual source of the calls.
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Roesel is accused of violating the Truth In Caller ID Act, according to a report by The Consumerist. The act prohibits anyone from spoofing caller ID information “with the intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value.”
According to The Consumerist, Roesel’s automated calls weren’t just irritating – they interfered with an emergency medical network. Medical paging services company Spōk alerted the agency in December that its network was being interrupted by robocalls. The subsequent FCC investigation led to Roesel.
The FCC verified that Roesel had made 82,106 insurance-related robocalls with phony caller IDs. At a proposed fine of $1,000 per call, Roesel is looking at more than $82.1 million in penalties, The Consumerist reported.
However, even that number is a drop in the bucket compared to the 21.5 million calls the FCC believes Roesel’s company made.
“The record shows that he instructed his employees which consumers to pick on: ‘The dumber and more broke, the better,’” FCC Chair Ajit Pai said during a meeting of FCC commissioners. “He was even quoted as repeatedly bragging and ‘joking’ to co-workers that his actions were minor legal violations, akin to driving above the speed limit.”
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