Telecommunications Relay Service - Fraudulent Uses in The United States

Fraudulent Uses in The United States

The open structure of relay services has led to a number of complaints regarding its use as a vehicle for fraud. In 2004, news outlets such as MSNBC and several newspapers including the Baltimore City Paper ran stories of reported abuse of the relay system, such as users from international locations calling businesses in the United States to fraudulently purchase goods. This has also generated numerous complaints, particularly by those who were employed as relay operators, that so-called "prank calls," where neither user requires the service and the caller is just attempting to have fun with a novel mode of communication. In December 2006, NBC ran another story where former operators alleged that "85 to 90 percent" of calls were scams. Since it is illegal for relay service companies to keep records, fraudulent users can operate with impunity. Fraudulent calls of both types have been cited as reasons for further relay regulation, and as causes for long hold times that must be endured by many legitimate users. Most businesses legally cannot have relay calls blocked due to the need for legitimate users to be accommodated, although businesses that are repeatedly victimized by pranks and/or scams often stop trusting relay calls or hang up on them because it is difficult to distinguish legitimate users from illegitimate ones; this is another way that the abusers of the service ultimately victimize the legitimate users, in addition to tying up the service from them.

Relay operators are legally required to relay all communication between the parties without making any judgments, and if an operator does anything to contravene this duty such as warning the hearing user of a possible prank/scam, the operator would likely be terminated from his/her job and face legal penalties. Therefore, pranksters abusing the service can force and enslave the relay operators to say whatever the pranksters want, even profanity or terroristic threats, and there is nothing the operators or the relay providers can do about it -- the operators must speak every word faithfully. In fact, the relay companies profit by servicing prank and scam calls because they are paid the service fees by the government for doing so (even though they don't have a choice). The pranksters use the relay operators as their personal voice puppets. Some pranksters have ways to be conferenced into the voice call (such as by placing a three-way call) to listen to and record the voice side of the conversation, while they simultaneously act as the typing TTY user. Some relay calls are both scams and pranks simultaneously, such as placing phony orders for on-location services such as taxicab, locksmith, pizza-delivery, etc. against an unsuspecting victim. One variant of the relay prank is for entertainment purposes, when there is no call-receiving victim at all, but rather the prankster calls him/herself by relay and uses the operator as a narrator for things like poems, song lyrics that the prankster plays music to, raps, etc., in which the prankster records the narration and posts it on websites like YouTube. In some relay pranks the pranksters force the operators to self-referentially insult themselves, cuss out their supervisors, speak ill of their workplace, etc., which sometimes confuses the operators and causes them to ask for supervisor assistance. Operators are usually trained well enough (or inured to the work they do) that they dispassionately dictate everything in prank calls call without cracking up regardless of how ridiculous the content of what they are saying may be.

In 2006, the FCC launched a campaign to gather feedback from the various Internet Protocol relay-certified companies operating within the United States to fight the wave of relay scams and pranks being made over the service. As brought up in the FCC's released document, users on the IP-based relay services can thus place their calls anonymously, which cannot certify that the user in question really needs operator assistance or not. Furthermore, fraudulent calls of any nature cost millions to the American people yearly (based on the $1.293 per minute fee that is being paid for completed IP-based relay) to various relay providers for successfully completed calls.

Starting in November 2009, to help counter the problem of fraudulent use, the FCC began requiring all users of IP Relay to register their screen names with a default IP Relay provider. This along with many IP Relay providers working to educate hearing users of the risks of fraudulent users (making it less lucrative for fraudulent users who no longer have an uneducated population to target) and other efforts has greatly reduced the amount of fraudulent use of the IP Relay system.

In March 2012, the United States federal government announced a lawsuit against AT&T. The specific accusations state that AT&T "violated the False Claims Act by facilitating and seeking federal payment for IP Relay calls by international callers who were ineligible for the service and sought to use it for fraudulent purposes. The complaint alleges that, out of fears that fraudulent call volume would drop after the registration deadline, AT&T knowingly adopted a non-compliant registration system that did not verify whether the user was located within the United States. The complaint further contends that AT&T continued to employ this system even with the knowledge that it facilitated use of IP Relay by fraudulent foreign callers, which accounted for up to 95 percent of AT&T’s call volume. The government’s complaint alleges that AT&T improperly billed the TRS Fund for reimbursement of these calls and received millions of dollars in federal payments as a result."