SO last year about this time the FCC nearly destroyed Phone Burner with a directive to carriers to cease carrying traffic from the popular platform.

And this year Veriwave is getting the death stare.

In a new notice from the FCC, Veriwave was given 48 hours to come into compliance with FCC rules or see all of its traffic shut down.

The FCC advised every US carrier it would have to stop carrying the traffic because of millions of robocalls allegedly carried by Veriwave related to a non-existent “National Tax Relief Program.”

The calls apparently did not identify the caller and did not provide a call back number. They were part of a “press 1” campaign that dumped callers to a call center with agents who would ask for personal information while never disclosing the identity of the calling party.

The FCC was tipped off to the calls by YouMail who notified the ITG, who conducted several tracebacks, all of which lead back to Veriwave.

When Veriwave was contacted it did not offer evidence of consent for the calls or contest the unlawful nature of the calls. The FCC then sent Veriwave an email and Veriwave did not respond. (We’ve seen this before.)

As a result Veriwave is on death’s doorstep. If it doesn’t immediately conform to the FCC’s rules–unclear how it can do that in connection with calls that have already been made–the FCC will pull the plug.

A few things to notice here:

• Veriwave is a platform and NOT the actual party that made the calls;
• The calls at issue were almost certainly made by some scumbag lead gen company looking to generate tax relief leads– AND DEFINITELY ARE NOT R.E.A.C.H. MEMBERS;
• YouMail once again is at the center of a potential carrier shutdown (you NEED to watch my interview with YouMail CEO Alex Quilici to get a sense of how this works);
• Veriwave’s failure to provide consent records is critical here. If you are a carrier or platform you MUST know your customer and you MUST be able to produce consent for any large-volume robocall campaigns traversing your network. Failure to do these things is potential death for your company!