An investigator set out to discover the source of one robocall. Turns out, his target made them by the millions. Follow along as we reprint one part of this investigation each day, "Serial"-style.
Today we’re sharing PART 3. To catch up on parts one and two:
Part 1:
https://www.paronichlaw.com/news-1/2020/7/28/an-investigator-set-out-to-discover-the-source-of-one-robocall-turns-out-his-target-made-them-by-the-millions-follow-along-as-we-reprint-one-part-of-this-investigation-each-day-serial-style
Part 2: https://www.paronichlaw.com/news-1/2020/7/29/6893buduw5t8oig6zw20tt1r4f4urj
03.25.2019 06:00 AM
On the Trail of the Robocall King
An investigator set out to discover the source of one scammy robocall. Turns out, his target made them by the millions.
PART THREE
IN APRIL OF 2016, Young flew to Washington, DC, to meet with Kristi Thompson, deputy chief of the Enforcement Bureau at the FCC’s Telecommunications Consumers Division. Young had pulled together the information that he and Garvin had been gathering, hoping to persuade the FCC to get involved in the hunt. He was surprised when, almost as soon as he began speaking, he says, “there was visible excitement throughout the room.”
The FCC was chasing the same scammers. A few months earlier a medical paging company called Spok had come to the agency for help; a sudden influx of robocalls was flooding the company’s network. Pagers may seem like an anachronism, but they are still used by more than 80 percent of hospitals. Whoever was behind the TripAdvisor robocall campaign had inadvertently debilitated Spok’s networks by flooding pagers with digital messages they weren’t equipped to handle. Emergency room doctors, nurses, and first responders were getting delayed alerts. This was not just an annoyance; it was a matter of life and death.
Thompson’s team already had an idea where the calls were coming from. TripAdvisor “gave us the content of the messages, and the ‘why,’ ” an FCC official who worked on the case says. “We knew the ‘what,’ but we couldn’t see inside the messages like they could.”
Young returned to TripAdvisor headquarters feeling buoyed. Garvin soon came to him with another reason to celebrate. On July 29 he had driven to his sister-in-law’s house and was chatting in the front yard about dinner plans when his phone rang. Garvin saw a spoofed number and had an intuition. His sister-in-law was midsentence when Garvin blurted, “I have to go.” He sprinted to his car, grabbed a notebook, and picked up the call.
“This is TripAdvisor,” a chipper automated female voice said, and today was Garvin’s lucky day: He’d been awarded thousands of TripAdvisor credits for an exclusive vacation to the sunny Caribbean!
It was Garvin’s lucky day. He’d been collecting information for more than nine months, but everything he knew was secondhand. He had never heard the messages himself or been able to tie the Mexican resorts directly to the call centers and the fraudulent use of TripAdvisor’s name. Earlier in the summer, the complaints seemed to have stopped, and Garvin worried that the scammers had gone dark before he could pin them down. Now they were calling his cell phone.
Following the prompts, Garvin was transferred to a live agent, who asked his age range and if he made at least $60,000 a year. He passed the test and was quickly put on the line with a second live agent—the charmer. “You’ve won an all-inclusive trip to one of our fabulous resorts,” the agent said. “What do you like to do on vacation, Mr. Garvin?”
Garvin played along. “I like to hang out by the pool and have a few cocktails,” he said. Garvin did his best to maintain his composure as he sat in his car scribbling and trying to eke out company names and information from the agent. His sister-in-law had long since given up and gone inside.
When the agent sensed that the hook was in, he went in for the close: “This trip is valued at $4,000, but today it’s only $999. We accept Visa, Mastercard, or American Express. Which card would you like to use today?”
Garvin deflected. “If I make this purchase without asking my wife, I’m in the doghouse,” he told the agent. “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” the operator replied. Still, he gave Garvin a callback number and other information. When Garvin hung up, he drove home as fast as he could. Armed with new websites and names, he spent all night at his laptop. By the next morning, after sleuthing through social media and Mexican phone databases, he knew the real name of the call center agent and found the Facebook page of the call center’s CEO—people he could tie directly to the TripAdvisor scam. Now they had the evidence they needed to bring a full dossier to the FCC.
As Garvin gathered information about call centers in Mexico, Young began sending them cease and desist letters, explaining that TripAdvisor had learned of their ploy and threatening to turn them in to Mexican authorities. Most just ignored him or pleaded ignorance. Finally, one company—seeking to demonstrate its good intentions (or avoid a lawsuit)—offered up a key piece of information. Garvin and Young had assumed that the Mexican call centers were making the robocalls themselves. But they weren’t. They paid someone in the US to do that. Best of all, the newly solicitous Mexican company knew the first name and phone number of their American robocaller.
Young contacted Thompson at the FCC again. “Let’s have another meeting,” he said. With the first name, phone number, and some googling they had found their man: Adrian Abramovich.
Stay tuned for Part 4 tomorrow…
https://www.wired.com/story/on-the-trail-of-the-robocall-king/