Fall of a King Robocalls are as annoying as flies and pop-up
ads. While plenty are legal and informative, the illegal kind steal millions of dollars from
Americans each and every year. Adrian Abramovich is considered THE robocall-king of Florida!
Adrian got one of the largest fines in
FCC history, a whopping 120 million dollars because of his robocalling operation!
Robocalls Amid a list of other problems,
Robocalls have been plaguing America as some of the most lucrative forms of scams.
A robocall is a phone call that uses a computerized auto-dialer to deliver a
pre-recorded message. Some robocalls are perfectly legal. You'll usually get one from your pharmacy,
letting you know a prescription is ready. Politicians also use them around election
time to share info about their campaigns. However, a robocall should never ask you
for personal information or try to sell you something. If they do, it's a scam. In 2019,
Americans received 46 billion robocalls, some legal and some not-so-legal.
There are certain rules call centers must follow for legal robocalls. According to the FTC,
some robocalls don't require permission if the messages are purely informational. Like when
they are political calls or when the messages come from charities and health care providers.
Additionally, debt collection calls don't need permission. Any other call is illegal.
Americans receive all kinds of illegal robocalls-- they'll mention refunds,
insurance matters, job openings. It happens every day, and it becomes more of a nuisance every time.
"We are calling you regarding your inquiry about the latest iPhone 13" or "We can lower
your monthly interest rate by X percent!" are some examples of scam robocalls you've probably gotten.
And the persistence of these scammers doesn't go unrewarded;
they make a ton of money from innocent Americans. In 2020,
despite the ongoing pandemic, Americans lost a staggering $29.8 billion on phone scams alone.
Scammers use a trick called Spoofing, which disguises the caller ID to look local. In
most cases, the numbers appear like those within your neighborhood, tricking you into
picking the said calls. Adrian Abramovich
And since we are talking about scammers and robocalls, Adrian
Abramovich's name finds its rightful place in the discussion. Who is he? Adrian is the man
responsible for making over 100-million spoofed robocalls over three months in 2016.
The Pager Do you all remember
the pager? Others used to call it a beeper. Well, for those who missed it, a pager is a
wireless telecommunication device that lets you know when someone is trying to contact
you. You'd see their name or number pop up, and then you'd call them back from the nearest phone.
It dominated the messaging world back in the 80s, and early 90s, way before modern cell phones saw
the light of day. You may be wondering why we are bringing this up. It's because
Adrian's scam was running pretty smoothly until he started calling important pagers.
While pagers are considered obsolete today, they're still used in hospitals,
allowing the medical staff to communicate more efficiently. A doctor may get a page
alerting him of a dying patient in another room, for example. However,
pagers are just phones that can't be answered. They have a number attached to them just like
your cellphone, so when robocalls make their way to pagers, the entire system gets clogged up.
Pagers don't know how to decipher the automated messages, and doctors may miss out on emergencies.
Tripadvisor Scammers also
use robocalls in pitching fabulous vacations and getaways, mentioning industry giants like Hilton,
Expedia, Marriott, and Trip Advisor. Adrian entered the scamming world through Trip Advisor.
Trip Advisor is undoubtedly the world's largest travel website. The company takes
pride in enabling millions of travelers across the globe to plan a trip and review it after. However,
they'll never call you with deals and offers on discount vacations. They had
no affiliation with Adrian. Instead, Andrian used their image and likeness
to further his scam. It didn't take long for Tripadvisor to notice something was up.
Brad Young, a lawyer representing Tripadvisor, is in charge of investigating fraudulent activities
on the company's website and beyond. Being a company that is supposed to instill confidence
in their clients, they were rattled by robocalls hitting a million phones and
using their name without their consent; it became a matter of urgency for Brad and the company.
The morning of October 12th, 2015, remains vivid for Brad Young. It was the day he first
heard about what was happening. Brad remembers receiving an email from his boss that morning,
indicating that his wife had received a robocall. The number looked local, so she picked up. On the
other line was a pre-recorded message from Trip Advisor offering her a tempting vacation deal.
At that point, Brad's boss and his wife knew there was a problem since the company
didn't make phone calls to clients. Furthermore, they didn't sell trips.
Brad and his boss immediately figured out some fraudster somewhere
was using their brand to scam innocent Americans. Around the same time, before
the dust could settle on the wife's robocall incident, more consumer complaints about the
calls poured in. Brad remembers feeling hopeless. They didn't know how to handle the situation.
Customer complaints flooded the Trip Advisor inbox and call center.
They complained that the company was harassing them. Angry customer calls
didn't stop, and Brad knew it was time to get to the bottom of it.
Robocall-king Adrian was unaware that the company was a leader in fraud detection.
According to Brad, the company has been leading online review and fraud detection
for two decades. They've developed computer algorithms paired with a dedicated team of
individuals to spend 24 hours a day combing through fraudulent content.
Such content includes fake reviews, slander, and spam on the website.
Fred Garvin One of these
dedicated fraud detectives at Trip Advisor is Fred Garvin. Hailed as an expert in his field,
Fred constantly evolves and develops new methods for identifying fraud.
Fraudsters are always ahead of their victims, and someone of Fred's caliber was the best person to
deal with the evolving tactics. He was two, if not three, steps ahead of fraudsters. Like any
other expert detective, Fred isn't his real name, so don't waste time looking for his profile on the
internet! The name Fred Garvin hearkens back to an old SNL skit with Dan Aykroyd. However,
these TripAdvisor Robocalls proved to be a worthy opponent.
Being a fraud investigator, like any undercover work, requires an
alias. As a person who works around the clock to put people in jail, you attract a lot of
enemies. Those enemies want to know more about you, your family, and where you live
so that they can try to get to you and hurt you and your loved ones.
So, Fred is assigned the case and starts doing what he does best,
digging. Fred said he used Trip Advisor's forum to his advantage and looked for
similar complaints from users. The task was painstaking, but he remained focused.
Within a short time, Fred became intimately familiar with how the scam worked,
the robocall's pattern, and what the scammers offered to anyone who picked
the phone. The fraudsters, led by Adrian, would ask about the
victim's age and annual household income. They preferred those between 25 and 65,
and for household income, anywhere between 50,000-65,000 would be ideal for them.
Those who made it through those two hoops would be
connected to an agent in a call center somewhere in Mexico and occasionally
in the US. That would depend on the time the targeted victims received the call. The calls,
still, proved hard to pinpoint, even for Fred. Just when he felt like he'd hit a brick wall,
he received what he considers an early Christmas present—a TripAdvisor robocall.
He leaped at the chance, asked the questions, and received answers that he couldn't get
from distraught clients who called the company. He knew if he kept answering
and getting through to the call center itself, he'd only get more calls—thus
more evidence. While it may be fun to play with phone scammers when they call you,
don't. The longer you stay on the line, the more information about you they can obtain.
Software tracks call length, and those who remain on the line will always get more calls.
Mexico Fred's conversations
with the scammers led his team to call centers in Mexico,
specifically Cancun and the Yucatan Peninsula. He discovered the companies
pitching their services through the robocalls mysteriously connected to these IP addresses.
After concluding that the calls came from a call center in Mexico, the company's legal team
sent cease and desist orders to the companies benefiting from the calls.
And as luck may have it, one of the companies told
Fred that he was willing to give up information on one of their insiders.
As it turned out, the person responsible for the robocalls was not Mexican; he's an American.
The informant identified him as Adrian and gave his phone number to the Trip Advisor team. With
that latest information, Fred combed through the internet and unmasked Adrian Abramovich.
Fred also found out that Adrian had a consent judgment and an injunction
against him from AT&T from 2004 and 2007 for matters related to robocalling.
FCC Fine All this information only meant one thing—Adrian
was going down. Fred and his team gathered all the evidence and headed to the FCC. According to
Kristi Thompson, head of FCC's Telecommunications Consumer Division, the FCC had been conducting
their own investigations ever since millions of robocalls disrupted the hospital pager network.
Both teams sat at a round table meeting and laid out all the evidence they'd gathered. However,
neither was quick to reveal who they believed was at the center of the robocall operation.
Both sides had come to the same conclusion. Kristi remembers her jaw-dropping to the floor,
surprised that this small team reached the same conclusion as the FCC.
With overwhelming evidence behind the 96 million robocalls, the FCC
slapped Adrian with a $120 million fine. A Senate committee would later summon Adrian
to testify against the allegations made against him. The $120-million fine is one of the largest
fines in FCC history. The biggest fine ever by the FCC was issued for robocalling as well.
That fine was issued to two Texas telemarketers in March of 2021.
Shedding Light Alex Palmer, a freelance writer
on fraud cases and scammers, met Adrian after the whole saga. Despite his attorney advising
him against talking to the press, he granted Alex some of his time and shed light on a few things.
Adrian told Alex he descended from Polish immigrants who moved to Argentina. He also
mentioned that he had been involved in robocalling for a while and that he worked from a home office.
Adrian told Alex he felt mistreated, saying that he was trying to market legitimate services.
In the end, Adrian was the middle-man for the Mexican companies—he was the
one who made the robocalls to potential victims in America.
Combating Robocalls While the FCC keeps
working on eliminating such problems, Americans can help put an end to robocalling. Apps are
available to detect and block robocalls, and most modern smartphones come pre-equipped with
the ability to detect spam. They work like the spam blocker on your email,
diverting robocalls to your inbox or blocking them entirely. You'd never know you got one.
The FCC urges Americans to ignore calls from numbers they don't recognize, even if they look
local. Let it go to voicemail and then call back if there’s a message from a real person. Remember,
robocalls are only allowed to provide you with free information.
Anything that sounds like an offer is a scam.
Click to watch one of these next videos!