Losing no momentum from
last week's banishment of a voice carrier with no plan for controlling junk calls, the FCC has shifted its icy gaze to a quite recent source of illegal sales calls. They're part of a seasonal affliction, the category of companies promising relief from crushing tax debt, a quick fix which curiously never materializes after some hefty advance fees and valued data are collected.
The FCC and honeypot keeper YouMail tallied around 15.8 million canned calls blasting within a ninety day period, beginning the first of November 2023. The Industry Traceback Group study of the latter two months agreed, finding a consistent pattern of sales calls invoking a fictitious "National Tax Relief Program". The trail led clearly to Veriwave Telco of Delaware, which yesterday was put on the usual notice to either take out the trash or watch all their voice traffic get blocked.
Among the numerous sins of misleading statements and pestering untold swaths of mobile phone users with unwelcome canned audio, the FCC is also testy about the total lack of a given return phone number, one more violation count for the pending bonfire.
The FCC's nag notice helpfully includes a typical call transcript, matching several dozen others I've found on both YouMail and its major competitor. I've taken my example below from the Aaron Foss service since it's more complete and hosts dated audio captures. I've made further edits to accurately reflect the audio file. The skinny is that the governmental-ish "program" is teased early by an alleged "assistant to the director", whose recorded voice leads the recipient through 'qualifier' filters before passing to some call center. There a live agent "reportedly ask(s) for personal information, including date of birth and social security number".
"Helloooo, my name is Jessica, an assistant to the director here for the National Tax Relief Program. How are you doing today? [pause] All right, uuh, so I've been tasked to personally contact you and make sure that you have been provided the information about the new National Tax Relief Program. This relevant information is extremely imporr-ent with helping those that owe back taxes to rapidly clear their debts. So, can you tell me if you currently owe any back taxes at this time? [pause] Okay, let me go ahead and get you this information, then. One moment, please, here we go."I pause here at the call's long pause because the payload is in two parts. This first section plays like a simulation of a young woman on a speaker phone, or maybe it's not simulated. It's an office girl with a so-urgent message that she can't be bothered with a handset. This part functions like a soundboard, while trying hard to convince you it's a live voice, inserting a requisite scripted "uuh". She croaks the ends of her sentences as all women under thirty are now required by unwritten law. The performance is undermined by the lack of natural pauses between sentences and some obvious script reading. This stage takes up the first 38 seconds.
The next mows down another 87 seconds and shifts to a close mic technique, featuring the same woman. So to "get you this information" she had to run into a padded sound booth? "Jessica" lists a set of qualifiers, and this time wants keypress rather than vocal responses.
"Oh-kay! [pause] So this special program has been recently approved as of August 2022. The purpose of the tax dismissal program is to help those struggling with tax debt. However, there're certain requirements to be eligible. You cannot currently be in any other tax debt consolidation or settlement program. You cannot currently be in bankruptcy, and you must have a household income of under two hundred [pause for awkward inhale] and fifty thousand dollars a year. But you do have to have a monthly income of at least two thousand dollars a month. So I need to ask you, do you meet these minimum requirements for eligibility? Press one for yes, two for no. [05 sec. pause] Oh-kay! ..."I'm breaking here again because, as found in multiple honeypot captures, that entire disclosure spiel inexplicably starts again from that perky "OH-kay" and plays out exactly as before, through the 'press one or two' prompt. I suppose the dialer's system is instructed to repeat when no keypress tone is issued. So far I haven't found a capture of any transfer to the boiler room.
Supposedly other versions of this canned come-on appeared in the campaign. Thus far I keep finding only the same chat with "Jessica" as above. Certainly there are edit points which suggest a mix-and-match phrasing opportunity, not unusual for this sort of teaser call. I'd speculate that the two tiers of response methods are meant to frustrate an automated response, helping ensure that only people of a certain demographic with a pulse and a tax burden get tossed to the magnanimous closers waiting to implement the "relief".
Speaking of whom .... Well, the FCC and ITG don't speak much of them. We know the folks at Veriwave Telco offered no resistance to the tracebacks and no denials of what the investigation found. They even fingered the responsible client, named only in the ITG exhibits. Of course, the Feds weren't happy that their email on 02 February to Veriwave's Compliance Officer bounced, citing a flaw in the carrier's Robocall Mitigation Database file.
Aaaah, this must be where the soft underbelly is found, I thought as I fetched and unzipped that RMD file, submitted in early November. What inanely feeble effort will this be ... a photo of the break room wall? Someone's signature on a scrap of butcher paper from the lunch order? No, it's 600-some words of essay and bullet points describing a concerned effort to stay ahead of junk calls and prevent their distribution, composed by someone who paid attention in high school English. It is profuse in dedication to the cause, like in this quote:
"We remain devoted to fostering a safe voice service atmosphere and promise our ongoing endeavors to suppress the proliferation of illegal robocalls on our network."Way at the bottom, Veriwave names an outside vendor for "unique call analytics" to scrub for suspicious traffic, Sansay. This is a long established VOIP provider in San Diego. Apart from a punctuation error on its promo website, I'm having a similar problem spotting an obvious bad actor. Reportedly their STIR/SHAKEN attestation API runs a competitively priced $3K a year, provided you're not also leaning on their own servers. Still, that would be an obstacle for some garage outfit scammers.
The last party left to examine is Veriwave's client, a small accounting firm down in Tampa, Florida. A-HA! Apex Advisor Group Inc., formerly Cutler Bay Tax Services, huh? So very many fraud roads lead to Florida! This will be the impenetrable rabbit warren of deceit and misdirection where the schemers grind their hands and .... uuuhhm. Stand by. Their website sprung up in no time, and they have a low (and I mean
trickling) traffic YouTube channel. Between the two, you get plenty of chances to see the small team working there, amid some stock photo assets. In fact, a new and innocuous video on the merits of forming a Limited Liability Company was released the same day as the FCC's nasty-gram to Veriwave.
Yes, there is some promo copy given to "Back Tax Resolution Services" and Offers in Compromise. The latter term is an IRS option which is very much harder to secure than the average goofy late-night TV ad for tax debt fixers would have us believe. The applicant success rate is around one-third from what I've gathered. But I'm not parsing Apex marketing copy as over-promising an easy "tax dismissal" escape hatch. These bookkeepers have been operating much longer than the illegal call blitz, and seem too houseproud to dirty their credentials. I
could chuck bricks at some of their brief videos for making and repeating tiresome beginner's mistakes of production, but my crit session would not be germane. (Fun, yes ... relevant, no)
I see the smoke, but not the gun. It's early yet in my intel strafing, and I don't draw a government salary for the displeasure. I
would note that "Jessica" kept on calling past the end of January, surely after multiple tracebacks were run. As I write, the honeypot call detections appear to end just seven days ago.
I'm sitting here with no place on the corkboard to pin the red yarn, seeing but a few ways the case will crack:
* Veriwave processed the tracebacks and said "what-evs" until the FCC looked serious about stopping them.
* Veriwave actually sent its client packing, and that client swiftly found another carrier spigot for its sludge.
* Apex has done a superb job of brushing down its tracks from the crime scene.
* Someone at either side of the arrangement hired secret smarties to manage a fraudulent side gig.
* The smarties are using Apex as an unwitting patsy.
* It's a solar flare's doing, and we're all too hung up on that blasted eclipse next week to notice.
The one line of good news here is the ever-shortening latency between dangerously god-awful junk call campaigns and reactions from Federal watchdogs. Yes, I hear you, we badly need improvement of the punishment stage. Let's just enjoy the small victory of exposure for the moment.
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FCC Orders Provider Cease 'National Tax Relief Program' Robocalls - FCC press release, 04 Apr 2024
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