The Federal Communications Commission has issued citations that accuse two companies, Dialing Services and Democratic Dialing, of placing unwarranted to calls to millions of customers during America’s presidential election in 2012. The companies could be fined $16,000 per call for robotic calls that were allegedly placed in 2011 and 2012 amounting to nearly $4.8 million
The companies had been hired by both the Democratic and Republican parties. FCC says that the perpetrators failed to provide proper identification as required by federal law and were in violation of the Communications Act. The act prohibits robotic and auto-dialed calls to mobile phones except when there is an emergency
With many people using mobile phones, such automated calls have been on the increase and consumers have been sounding the alarm on this issue. In Kenya, Airtel uses the same model of advertisement with a bot calling random numbers, a model that was also in use during the political campaigns.
The FCC set out to crackdown on the practice in 2012, with the Federal Trade Commission announcing a cash reward of $50,000 for a solution that will block robotic calls on mobile and landline telephones.
