Lawsuit On Impostor Phone Calls

     From a press release (emphasis added):

The Department of Justice filed civil actions for temporary restraining orders today in two landmark cases against five companies and three individuals allegedly responsible for carrying hundreds of millions of fraudulent robocalls to American consumers, the Department of Justice announced.  The Department of Justice alleges that the companies were warned numerous times that they were carrying fraudulent robocalls — including government- and business-imposter calls — and yet continued to carry those calls and facilitate foreign-based fraud schemes targeting Americans.  The calls, most of which originated in India, led to massive financial losses to elderly and vulnerable victims across the nation. ...

The two cases announced today contain similar allegations.  The defendants in one case are Ecommerce National LLC d/b/a TollFreeDeals.com; SIP Retail d/b/a sipretail.com; and their owner/operators, Nicholas Palumbo, 38, and Natasha Palumbo, 33, of Scottsdale, Arizona.  The defendants in the other case include Global Voicecom Inc., Global Telecommunication Services Inc., KAT Telecom Inc., aka IP Dish, and their owner/operator, Jon Kahen, 45, of Great Neck, New York.  In each case, the Department of Justice sought an order immediately halting the defendants’ transmission of unlawful robocall traffic.  A federal court has entered a temporary restraining order against the Global Voicecom defendants. ...

In the cases announced today, the United States alleges that the defendants operated voice over internet protocol (VoIP) carriers, which use an internet connection rather than traditional copper phone lines to carry telephone calls.  Numerous foreign-based criminal organizations are alleged to have used the defendants’ VoIP carrier services to pass fraudulent government- and business-imposter fraud robocalls to American victims.  The complaints filed in the cases specifically allege that defendants served as “gateway carriers,” making them the entry point for foreign-initiated calls into the U.S. telecommunications system.  The defendants carried astronomical numbers of robocalls.  For example, the complaint against the owners/operators of Ecommerce National d/b/a TollFreeDeals.com alleges that the defendants carried 720 million calls during a sample 23-day period, and that more than 425 million of those calls lasted less than one second, indicating that they were robocalls.  The complaint further alleges that many of the 720 million calls were fraudulent and used spoofed (i.e., fake) caller ID numbers.  The calls facilitated by the defendants falsely threatened victims with a variety of catastrophic government actions, including termination of social security benefits, imminent arrest for alleged tax fraud and deportation for supposed failure to fill out immigration forms correctly. ...

     So, why aren't they indicting the U.S. residents in this case? It makes you wonder about the strength of the evidence.