In In the Matter of Telnyx LLC, File No.: EB-TCD-24-00037170, NAL/Acct. No.: 202432170009, FRN: 0018998724 (Feb 4, 2025 released) the FCC stated the Commission’s “staff and their family members, among others, were targeted with calls containing artificial and prerecorded voice messages that purported to be from a fictitious FCC ‘Fraud Prevention Team’ as part of a government imposter scam aimed at fraudulently extracting payments of large amounts of money by intimidating recipients of the calls.”

So, they targeted FCC employees–the primary federal regulator of robocalls– with fake fraud prevention robocalls. I mean, the chutzpah.

Per the order, “[t]he FCC has no such “Fraud Prevention Team” and the FCC was not responsible for these calls.” But when they were answered the called party was threatened with prosecution unless they– you guessed it– bought some gift cards:

” One recipient of an Imposter Call reported that they were ultimately connected to someone who “demand[ed] that [they] pay the FCC $1000 in Google gift cards to avoid jail time for [their] crimes against the state.”

Unsurprisingly the Commission was pissed and wanted blood, or the money equivalent of blood.

Being unable to determine who the real bad guys were they took out their fury upon the carrier that apparently permitted the calls to get connected– Telnyx LLC. In the FCC’s words the company failed “to take affirmative, effective measures to prevent malicious actors from using its network to originate illegal voice traffic.”

Now what’s interesting is that Telnyx apparently signed up MarioCop on February 6, 2024, and the calls went out that same day. Telnyx then stopped the traffic immediately. But that did not save it from penalty. The FCC was pissed Telnyx let these guys on the network to begin with.

And when you dig down into this there are red flags everywhere to be seen:

• The company address provided by MarioCop was the address of a Sheraton hotel in Canada.
• The email address domain used by MarioCop (@mariocop123.com) is not a real domain associated with any known business.
• The IP address for the MarioCop Account was from Edinburgh, Scotland and was not affiliated with the physical Toronto address; and, perhaps most tellingly:
• MarioCop paid Telnyx in Bitcoin and the Bitcoin transaction ID and wallet address the MarioCop Accounts used to pay Telnyx were anonymized and could not be traced.

They paid in Bitcoin????????????????

Just unreal.

Obviously pretty serious lapses in the KYC process here. And the FCC proposes to hit Telnyx with a $4.5MM penalty as a result.