The Federal Communications Commission today said that a scammer named Adrian Abramovich "apparently made 96 million spoofed robocalls during a three-month period" in order to trick people into buying vacation packages. The FCC proposed a fine of $120 million, but it will give the alleged perpetrator a chance to respond to the allegations before issuing a final decision.

The robocalls appeared to come from local numbers, and they told recipients to "press 1" to hear about exclusive vacation deals from well-known hotel chains and travel businesses such as Marriott, Expedia, Hilton, and TripAdvisor, the FCC said.

"Consumers who did press the button were then transferred to foreign call centers where live operators attempted to sell vacation packages often involving timeshares," the FCC said. "The call centers were not affiliated with the well-known travel and hospitality companies mentioned in the recorded message."

In reality, the travel agencies that robocall recipients were directed to "were fronts for one or more Mexican-based call centers engaged in selling timeshares and vacation packages to various timeshare facilities," the FCC said. These agencies contracted with Abramovich to receive calls generated by his robocall operation, paying him daily for various amounts of phone calls, the FCC said.

The FCC began investigating after TripAdvisor notified the commission of the scheme last year. A citation issued to Abramovich accuses him of violating the Telephone Consumer Protection Act's robocall limits. The misrepresentations in the prerecorded messages also constitute criminal wire fraud, the FCC said.

96,758,223 robocalls, to be exact

Abramovich, working through his marketing companies, "appears to have made 96,758,223 robocalls between October 1, 2016 and December 31, 2016," FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said at today's FCC meeting. Commission investigators used software to analyze the details of all the calls, and they "hand-verified" more than 80,000 of them. The investigators found that each one was spoofed to appear to be a local number. Pai said the scheme preyed on the elderly, many of whom spent a few hundred or a few thousand dollars on "exclusive" vacation packages.

"Robocalling is consistently the top-ranked category of complaints that consumers bring to the FCC. That's why I'm pleased that today the commission is taking major, unprecedented action against what appears to be the most egregious 'neighbor spoofing' robocalling scheme we have ever seen," Pai said.

Abramovich's mass-robocalling campaigns during 2015 and 2016 "bombarded American consumers and repeatedly disrupted a critical telecommunications service used by hospitals and emergency medical providers," the FCC also said. This critical telecommunications service was identified as Spōk, a medical paging system for hospitals, emergency rooms, and doctors.

"Because paging technology is not equipped to handle voice calls, a large-scale robocalling campaign will disrupt—and can potentially disable—the medical pager network," the FCC wrote. "According to Spōk, the large volume of illegal calls had the potential to render Spōk's network completely inoperable, and many of Spōk's customers reported intermittent outages."

12 companies in Abramovich's name

Abramovich is based in Miami, Florida, and has formed 12 corporations in the state over the past 20 years, "many of which only existed for one year before he dissolved them," the FCC said. In nearly all cases, "Abramovich was the sole incorporator, officer, and director," the commission said.

When the FCC proposes fines, the alleged perpetrator is given an opportunity to dispute the allegations. Sometimes the FCC will reach a settlement for a lower fine, but it could also issue an order requiring payment of the full amount. Abramovich was given 30 days to respond. The last time the FCC proposed a fine of at least $100 million involved AT&T's throttling of unlimited data plans, but no settlement was reached and the commission never took final action.

We were unable to get through to Abramovich today via a listed phone number or an e-mail address associated with one of his businesses.

Robocalls from spoofed numbers have been tricky to defeat with existing call-blocking tools. The FCC has proposed rules that would let carriers block spoofed robocalls when the Caller ID can't possibly be valid.