Praying on consumers’ fears of the coronavirus, Pakistani national Usman Khan and his Virginia-based companies, VoIP Terminator Inc. and BLMarketing Inc. were accused of transmitting illegal calls that included recorded messages about air duct cleaning services that purportedly filtered out COVID-19, the Department of Justice said in a statement.
They were allegedly also transmitting messages involving credit card interest rate reduction and tech support scams, it said.
Therefore, they violated the Telemarketing Sales Rule by assisting and facilitating the transmission of illegal calls for their customers even after learning that their services were being used to initiate calls to numbers on the Do Not Call Registry and to place spoofed robocalls, it added.
Khan and his companies were hit with a US$3.2 million civil penalty, though it has been suspended because he does not have the funds to actually pay it.
Telemarketing is one of the many forms of cybercrime that have exploded since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.
The investigation into the calls was part of an initiative to clamp down on COVID-19 disinformation that started last year.
“On May 17, 2021, the Attorney General established the COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to marshal the resources of the Department of Justice in partnership with agencies across government to enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud,” said the DOJ.
As part of the settlement, Khan is barred from engaging in similar activity and must vet clients to make sure they are not sending spam calls.
