--- author: "Eric Priezkalns" published: "2026-10-26T04:25:27+00:00" modified: "2026-10-24T19:01:43+00:00" title: "Norwegian Telco Dumps Major US Carrier over Supply of Phone Numbers to Scammers" permalink: "https://commsrisk.com/norwegian-telco-dumps-major-us-carrier-over-supply-of-phone-numbers-to-scammers/" --- # Norwegian Telco Dumps Major US Carrier over Supply of Phone Numbers to Scammers 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](https://commsrisk.com/telcos-owned-by-ericsson-and-bandwidth-investigated-for-kyc-scammer-failings/). The American leadership of Bandwidth Inc. remains tight-lipped following the revelations. [David Doolittle, Bandwidth’s VP of Global Communications](https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidedoolittle/), 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](https://ncdoj.gov/attorney-general-jeff-jackson-leads-phase-2-of-operation-robocall-roundup-announces-investigation-of-major-service-providers-inteliquent-bandwidth-lumen-and-peerless/). 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](https://commsrisk.com/fake-invoices-lure-victims-into-callback-scams/). There have been other occasions when Bandwidth had plenty to say about how the world should tackle scams. Bandwidth is one of the four US companies that has launched (and repeatedly relaunched) the so-called Cross-Border Call Authentication Governance Authority (CBCA-GA). This body seeks to decide whose international calls can be trusted. Per the [press release](https://atis.org/press-releases/atis-and-industry-partners-take-major-step-toward-authenticating-cross-border-calls-and-protecting-consumers/) heralding the most recent relaunch, the “primary goal is to help prevent fraudulent and spoofed calls, particularly those originating outside a country’s borders”. However, the US businesses that run the CBCA-GA aggressively lobbied European regulators against the adoption of antifraud controls that now block the majority of spoofed international calls targeting European phones. Their essential argument was that billion-dollar US enterprises are better at judging international carriers than any national regulator even though the same firms also oppose antifraud controls that have proven highly effective everywhere they have been tried. It goes without saying that their lobbying has successfully prevented the adoption of those controls within the USA, leaving Americans at far more risk than peers in other advanced economies. Linda Vandeloop, the woman who would become the boss of the CBCA-GA if it received international recognition, was instrumental in having this author ejected from the One Consortium association. Her complaint was that I blew the whistle when a group of US businesses belonging to One Consortium, led by Vandeloop, decided they would [water down the existing international know-your-customer (KYC) standard issued by a sister organization so it could never be enforced by national authorities in practice](https://commsrisk.com/the-final-commsrisk-article/). GIRAF is a spin-off of One Consortium, begging serious questions about whether these regulators will take tough enforcement action when leading members of One Consortium actively seek to undermine their ability to protect ordinary phone users from scams. At the date of writing, One Consortium has made no public announcement about whether it will suspend Bandwidth’s participation in their Leadership Council, despite the growing number of regulators that are questioning the extent to which Bandwidth has facilitated scam activity in multiple countries. Bandwidth are one of several companies betting heavily on the increased use of the cloud to enable international telemarketing and other business comms that cross borders. By my rough calculations, Bandwidth has an 8% share of Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) revenues in the USA, and around 3% of global CPaaS revenues. They are well positioned to exploit the transition to cloud communications as PSTN networks are retired and communications become entirely IP from end-to-end, so long as national governments and regulators maintain a *laissez faire* policy on the spam that crosses national borders. Such a policy would be a disaster for the general public, making it almost impossible to meaningfully trace or punish wrongdoing instigated by scammers in one part of the world, then fed through a chain of computers to obscure the origin, before targeting victims in a different country, as now increasingly performed by AI-powered multilingual bots. Norway has been especially robust at obstructing nuisance traffic which crosses borders, meaning this news from NRK is a setback for Bandwidth’s international lobbying campaign. American attempts to introduce increased traceability of scam activity are notable because of how feeble they are. They appear to be empty promotional stunts orchestrated by big business with the intention to distract from policy alternatives that would more effectively reduce crime. In particular, they grossly underestimate the resources that would be required to make comms traceable in a world where all traffic flows through the cloud. *Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?* The question of who oversees our so-called guardians is as old as recorded history. For most people, and even for national regulators, international telecoms is too complicated to fully understand. That is why criminals keep getting away with scams, and telcos rarely get punished, even though they evidently profited from the supply of the services used by the scammers. It is notable that leadership in this arena has been assumed during the last few years by a mixture of people who never took an interest in telecoms fraud before, or whose principle role is to negotiate down the cost of compliance with laws and regulations. Allowing them to take charge of fighting fraud is like putting well-paid bankers in charge of managing risk within the financial sector, then being surprised that the whole world had to bail them out during the 2008 crash. Expertise is important when dealing with obscure systems and business practices, but expertise is worthless if it is only deployed at the behest of the corporations who profit from lax rules and regulations. Businesses and their shills will provide plausible-sounding stories about fighting crime and protecting the public; they will never instigate the change that is actually required to protect us all from harm. The most severe cost these comms businesses must accept is the need to spend a lot more on turning away sales. Bad actors need to be vetted, identified and rejected before they gain access to comms networks and services. That means hiring staff with the authority and confidence to reject customers. We need to stop crime before it can occur, not delude ourselves with vague promises about catching criminals later on. We are barely able to keep up with the security threats posed by AI as they currently stand; imagine the difficulty of finding a person responsible for a scam when organized crime syndicates can deploy AI that is even smarter than the tools already at their disposal. The systemic flaw in global comms is no different to the systemic flaw in global finance. Banks should have turned away hoards of customers that applied for subprime loans which they were obviously unable to repay if the housing market swung against them. Those banks ignored the risk and boosted their profits instead. Everybody but the bankers was forced to pay the price for their greed. Telcos are no different; their executives are as greedy, though somewhat less smart, than the people running banks. That is why they take money from criminals even as they promise to reduce crime by selling new methods to reduce crime. The only antidote to systemic flaws of this nature is strong government and strong enforcement of regulation. None of the people speaking on behalf of the comms sector have any interest in reducing sales, even though this reduction is vital to restoring integrity in the comms ecosystem. If that means businesses like Bandwidth have to disappoint shareholders by reporting lower revenues, lower growth and lower profits, then so be it. NRK’s report about Bandwidth can be found [here](https://www.nrk.no/dokumentar/nrk-avslorer_-telefonsvindlerne-ringer-fra-norske-nummer-1.18040432).