TUCSON, Ariz. — An Arizona company was fined $37.5 million for making millions of illegal marketing calls, the Federal Communications Commission announced Tuesday.
Affordable Enterprises of Arizona, which is based in Tucson, made 2.3 million marketing calls selling home improvement services from 2016 to 2017 using spoofed phone numbers, according to the FCC.
Spoofing the call would show phone numbers assigned to prepaid phones or random Arizona customers on caller ID instead of the marketing companies.
That makes the calls appear to come locally and protects the companies from callbacks. Spoofing phone numbers for marketing purposes is illegal under the Truth in Caller ID Act.
The FCC says one woman had her personal number used in the spoofing scheme and that she was receiving daily complaint calls from people she never contacted.
The company came under investigation after a former employee tipped off the FCC.
