The FCC issued a notice permitting the carriers to begin blocking calls from three entities “One Street Financial,” “Main Street Financial,” and “Alliant Financial” following unsatisfactory responses to ITG tickets.

USTelecom’s Industry Traceback Group (ITG) conducted tracebacks on 13 calls placed to wireless numbers between November 10, 2023 and February 3, 2024.

The calls delivered prerecorded messages purportedly related to debt consolidation loans and claimed to be from “One Street Financial,” “Main Street Financial,” and “Alliant Financial.” Notice that these names are confusingly similar to–but apparent different from– entirely unrelated financial entities: (1) MainStreet Financial Services; and (2) Alliant Financial Solutions. (The FCC reports that both of these companies have posted warnings on their websites that their names are being used by another party to make “spam type calls offering lending services.”)

Consumers who returned calls from Alliant Financial, Main Street Financial, and One Street to request removal from the entities’ calling lists assert that they continued to receive an influx of calls despite these requests.

When ITG contacted Alliant it claimed it had prior consent, which it purportedly obtained through opt-in webpages. But Alliant could not provide evidence of such prior express written consent for six of the calls. For seven of the calls Alliant provided videos of online consent forms supposedly being filled out (presumably a Jornaya or Active Prospect). But these numbers were part of Verizon’s honeypot–and not numbers assigned to actual consumers.

As a result the FCC is authorizing (but not requiring as we have seen in the past) that all US Carriers cease carrying traffic from Alliant.

This is obviously a massive deal for Alliant and it looks like the issue arose from buying bad leads. As to one set of calls the lead supplier could not provide a webform submission at all. As to the other set a Jornaya or Trusted Form was supplied but the lead was obviously fraudulent since they contained numbers that did not belong to consumers– a result that would have been avoided with the fraud detection requirements imposed by the R.E.A.C.H. standards.

Then again, these guys were not exactly playing honest with consumers to begin with. Using confusing names that sound like actual finance companies is plainly going to get you in trouble with the FCC. So these guys probably had it coming.

Regardless, really fascinating outcome here. Further reason to take ITG responses deadly seriously.