The antifraud practices of Bandwidth, one of the biggest wholesale carriers in the USA, is coming under further scrutiny following an investigation by journalists into scam investment calls received in Norway. Martin Gundersen and Dan Kåre Engebretsen of Norwegian state broadcaster NRK reported:
The American telecommunications company Bandwidth was the actor with the most suspicious calls, according to NRK’s investigations.
Most of the phone calls came from abroad, but many also came from Norway.
NRK can now report that Bandwidth has been assigned 31,100 phone numbers in Norway and that their Norwegian numbers are being misused for fraud.
Translated from the original Norwegian.
The investigation determined that the scammers did not spoof the Norwegian phone numbers they used. Those numbers were part of the allocation granted to Bandwidth’s European subsidiary, Voxbone, by the Norwegian authorities. Voxbone now uses their parent company’s brand and infrastructure following their 2020 acquisition by Bandwidth Inc.
Unifon, a Norwegian B2B telco, has terminated their carrier contract with Bandwidth following the revelations. Jardar Føreland Pedersen, CEO of Unifon, told NRK that “it is right to react” to information about the misuse of telecom services although they had no evidence that Bandwidth had done anything illegal.
Johannes Vallesverd of Nkom, the Norwegian comms regulator, said they are in contact with Bandwidth but that it was too early to determine if any punishment would be appropriate. Vallesverd was a prime mover in the formation of the Global Informal Regulatory Antifraud Forum (GIRAF), a group of national regulators seeking to tackle scams in the comms sector. Ofcom, the UK regulator, has since assumed leadership of GIRAF and recently instigated its own investigation into the abuse of UK phone numbers allocated to Bandwidth.
The American leadership of Bandwidth Inc. remains tight-lipped following the revelations. David Doolittle, Bandwidth’s VP of Global Communications, refused to talk about the abuse of Norwegian phone numbers and would only say his company works with law enforcement and industry partners to tackle crime.
Doolittle by name, do little by corporate nature. The American company wisely chooses to say nothing about the criminal abuse of services they provide around the world. Bandwidth is already the subject of an investigation by a ‘joint task force’ of state prosecutors in the USA. That task force is focused on scam calls that target Americans but they are mostly wasting their time because they are too focused on the spoofing of robocalls and have paid insufficient regard to the supply of genuine numbers to criminals. Meanwhile, the American activist group Demurrage has repeatedly documented Bandwidth’s role in supplying US phone numbers to scammers.
