Drummond lauds court's rejection of Avid Telecom attempt to dismiss illegal robocalls lawsuit

OKLAHOMA CITY (May 10, 2024) - Attorney General Gentner Drummond today praised a decision by the U.S. District Court in Arizona to deny Avid Telecom's multiple attempts to dismiss and delay a bipartisan lawsuit against Avid Telecom, its owner and its vice president. Drummond and 48 other attorneys general sued the company in May 2023 for initiating and facilitating billions of illegal robocalls to millions of people across the nation.

"Avid Telecom needs to be held accountable for its ceaseless attempts to intentionally scam Oklahomans and for knowingly violating a host of federal and state telemarketing and consumer laws," Drummond said. "These scams can often lead to financial hardship. I am grateful to the court for allowing this important litigation to go forward."

Avid Telecom is a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service provider that sells data, phone numbers, dialing software, and/or expertise to help its customers make mass robocalls. It also serves as an intermediate provider and allegedly facilitated or helped route more than 24 billion scam calls in a four-year period about Social Security Administration scams, Medicare scams, auto warranty scams, Amazon scams, DirecTV scams, credit card interest rate reduction scams, and employment scams.

About 101 million of those calls were to numbers in Oklahoma. The company continued transmitting these calls even after being notified at least 329 times that these illegal robocalls were being sent across their networks.

Further, Avid helped make hundreds of millions of calls using spoofed or invalid caller ID numbers, including more than 8.4 million calls that appeared to be coming from government and law enforcement agencies, as well as private companies.

A copy of the order is available at https://www.oag.ok.gov/sites/g/files/gmc766/f/documents/2024/64_-_order_...

###