DENVER — The calls show up on your phone from friendly Colorado towns. Places like Hudson, or Georgetown, or Allenspark, a town of less than 500 that hardly even has cell phone service.
And yet, 148 million spam calls rang through Colorado phones in the past five years, routed through places like Allenspark.
Now, Colorado Democratic Attorney General Phil Weiser joined attorneys general from across the country in filing a lawsuit Tuesday against a company called Avid Telecom, based in Arizona. The suit alleges the small company and its owner are responsible for transmitting 7.5 billion calls to phone numbers on the national do not call registry.
"I’m sorry that Allenspark, Colorado, or Hudson, or other small towns are getting known for originating robocalls," joked Weiser. "Obviously they did nothing to warrant that and I can’t give you the backstory as to how that started to happen."
The lawsuit alleges that Avid Telecom provides the technology to other companies to make endless amounts of calls. So how’d they get caught? The evidence came with how long the calls lasted.
"Over 90% of these calls actually last 10 to 15 seconds, which is a telltale sign that these are robocalls. That’s because if a robocall doesn’t reach a live person, they’re done," said Weiser. "This company gave people the tools to make it easy to send robocalls, to spoof phone numbers, and to scam people. They don’t get to turn a blind eye. They were clearly aiding and abetting this fraud."
Some calls came from places like Allenspark. Other times they’d show up on caller ID as being from the Boulder Police Department.
So the million dollar question here is, well, if this company is now potentially going to be shut down, does that mean we won’t have to deal with robocalls anymore? Short answer is… doubtful.
Just because this company may get shut down it doesn’t mean there aren’t others out there that do the same thing. So even if they do cut a company responsible for 148 million calls in Colorado, there are still more out there.
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