Robocall Traceback Requests, FCC Inquiries, and State AG Suits

The first sign that the government is looking at a company’s calls can be an email from its own phone carrier asking who placed a batch of calls and whether the people called agreed to them. A letter from the FCC or a state attorney general can follow. Each deserves a quick, accurate answer through counsel, because what a company tells regulators can reappear in later class actions. A business that preserves its records and answers carefully keeps the defenses it’ll need if a private suit follows.

What can the FCC do to a company that makes robocalls?

It can investigate, propose a fine, and impose one, though collecting the money takes a separate lawsuit.

An FCC investigation may open with a letter of inquiry from the agency’s Enforcement Bureau. The Communications Act gives the agency “full authority and power at any time to institute an inquiry, on its own motion,” under 47 U.S.C. § 403. Receiving one has a consequence worth knowing. The FCC’s truthful-statement rule reaches “Any person that has received a citation or a letter of inquiry from the Commission or its staff,” under 47 C.F.R. § 1.17(b)(4), so a written answer that gets a material fact wrong without a reasonable basis can become a violation of its own.

For a company that holds no FCC license, the law has long required a warning before a fine. A non-licensee generally can’t be fined unless it first “is sent a citation of the violation charged” and then repeats the conduct, under 47 U.S.C. § 503(b)(5). The 2019 TRACED Act removed that step for spoofing violations under § 227(e) and for violations of § 227(b), the TCPA’s consent rules for autodialed calls (placed by equipment that generates numbers randomly or sequentially) and prerecorded calls (calls that play a recorded or artificial voice): “Paragraph (5) of section 503(b) of this title shall not apply in the case of a violation of this subsection,” as 47 U.S.C. § 227(b)(4)(A) now reads. The TRACED Act left the citation requirement in place for Do Not Call violations under § 227(c). Check this first when an FCC letter arrives. A § 227(b) problem can go straight to a proposed fine, while a Do Not Call problem for a company without an FCC license usually needs a citation first.

The fine itself starts as a Notice of Apparent Liability, which is a proposal. The statute requires the FCC to give the company “an opportunity to show, in writing” why no fine should be imposed, under § 503(b)(4). For most businesses that aren’t carriers or broadcasters, the FCC’s inflation-adjusted cap is “$25,132 for each violation or each day of a continuing violation,” with a separate limit of “$188,491 for any single act or failure to act” on a continuing violation, and an intentional § 227(b) violation can add “an additional penalty not to exceed $12,266,” per 47 C.F.R. § 1.80(b).

The Sumco Panama forfeiture order shows how a per-call amount, applied to a sample, becomes a nine-figure number. The FCC’s order states that the fine “is calculated based on a randomly selected subset of 33,333 calls,” and that “The Commission never received payment or a response to the Notice. Therefore, we affirm the proposed forfeiture.” I read that as two lessons. Silence after a Notice of Apparent Liability is the worst available answer, and the sample behind the number is something a respondent can test.

An unpaid forfeiture isn’t self-collecting. When the fine came through a Notice of Apparent Liability, the government has to sue to collect it, and “any suit for the recovery of a forfeiture imposed pursuant to the provisions of this chapter shall be a trial de novo,” under 47 U.S.C. § 504(a). The TRACED Act also has a criminal-referral provision. When the Enforcement Bureau’s chief obtains evidence that “suggests a willful, knowing, and repeated robocall violation with an intent to defraud, cause harm, or wrongfully obtain anything of value,” section 11 says the chief “shall provide such evidence to the Attorney General,” meaning the U.S. Attorney General.

Can a state attorney general sue a business under the TCPA?

Yes, in federal court, when the state believes the business has engaged in a “pattern or practice” of unlawful calls under § 227(g).

The statute lets a state sue when its attorney general “has reason to believe that any person has engaged or is engaging in a pattern or practice of telephone calls or other transmissions to residents of that State in violation of this section,” under 47 U.S.C. § 227(g)(1). The state can seek an injunction, damages measured by actual monetary loss or “$500 in damages for each violation,” or both, and a court can increase the award up to three times if it finds the violations were willful or knowing. Federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over these TCPA suits, though a state can still go to its own courts under its general civil or criminal laws. The state must also “serve prior written notice of any such civil action upon the Commission,” and the FCC has the right to intervene.

States don’t need a lawsuit to start asking questions. Section 227(g)(5) keeps the TCPA from displacing each attorney general’s state-law powers “to conduct investigations,” which is why state civil investigative demands remain available.

On August 2, 2022, Minnesota’s attorney general announced he had joined a multistate investigation described as “the first action of the newly-formed Anti-Robocall Litigation Task Force of 50 attorneys general,” according to the Minnesota Attorney General’s release. The California Attorney General’s release that day said the task force had issued “civil investigative demands to 20 gateway providers and other entities.” The task force’s stated focus is the voice providers that carry robocall traffic. I wouldn’t read that as a carrier-only problem, because a provider under investigation will be asked about its customers.

One example is a suit by about 50 attorneys general filed May 23, 2023, in the District of Arizona against a VoIP provider and two of its officers, Arizona v. Michael D. Lansky, L.L.C., No. 4:23-cv-00233. In its May 8, 2024 order denying the defendants’ motion to dismiss, the court wrote that “The Complaint states claims against Defendants Lansky and Reeves, individually,” while adding that whether they “may be held individually liable” would depend on the record. After the plaintiffs chose not to amend, the court dismissed their alter ego and veil-piercing theory without prejudice in a July 2024 order. The court also denied the defendants’ motion to stay the case and refer issues to the FCC or the FTC, noting that the defendants’ proposed questions “seem to challenge Plaintiffs’ reliance on Industry Traceback Group notices,” and the order answered: “The Court is capable of assessing the relevancy of proffered evidence.” The allegations in the complaint have not been proven, and no court has found the defendants liable. As of the date of this post, the case is pending.

Two lessons for any company that calls or texts at volume. Officers who direct calling operations can be named personally, and state plaintiffs are relying on traceback notices a company received, a question the court declined to send to the FCC.

Why is our phone carrier asking about our calls?

Because the rules make your carrier answer for its traffic, and it needs your help to do that.

The FCC describes traceback as “the process of following the call path back to the point of origin,” in its Seventh Report and Order (FCC 23-37). Congress directed the FCC to register a single private consortium to run that effort, and as of April 17, 2025 the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau reported that “The current registered consortium is USTelecom – The Broadband Association’s Industry Traceback Group,” in DA 25-343.

Every voice provider in the chain has to cooperate. Under 47 C.F.R. § 64.1200(n)(1), a provider that receives a traceback request “from the Commission, civil law enforcement, criminal law enforcement, or the industry traceback consortium” must “fully respond to the traceback request within 24 hours of receipt of the request.” Under the rule’s timing provisions, the clock starts only during business hours and doesn’t run over weekends or federal holidays. Section 64.1200(n)(4) requires providers to take measures to keep “new and renewing customers” from originating illegal calls, including “exercising due diligence in ensuring that its services are not used to originate illegal traffic.”

So when the trail ends at your account, your carrier turns to you, and it’s working against a clock. Expect questions about who the calls were for, what was said, and where the consent came from. I’d answer them as if a plaintiff’s lawyer will read the reply someday, because one might. A thin or slow answer gives the carrier a reason to suspend the account under that know-your-customer duty. Ask the carrier, in writing, to preserve its call detail records for the campaign. When the FCC extended the 24-hour rule to all providers in FCC 23-37, it repeated a commenter’s warning that “voice service providers do not retain call detail records for a consistent period of time.”

Government inquiries at a glance

How do government findings show up in a later class action?

FCC orders and attorney general complaints are public, and a plaintiff’s lawyer can cite them.

The statutory protection is narrow, and I wouldn’t lean on it. The fact that the FCC issued a Notice of Apparent Liability “shall not be used, in any other proceeding before the Commission, to the prejudice of the person to whom such notice was issued,” unless the fine was paid or a court’s order to pay it has become final, under 47 U.S.C. § 504(c). That shield covers FCC proceedings, not a private TCPA case.

The rules of evidence give plaintiffs other paths. The public-records exception covers, in a civil case, a public office’s “factual findings from a legally authorized investigation,” under Federal Rule of Evidence 803(8), unless the opponent shows the findings aren’t trustworthy. An attorney general’s complaint and a Notice of Apparent Liability aren’t findings. The trustworthiness condition also gives a defendant room to attack the findings that do exist. Your own letters to the FCC or a state are easier still to use against you. A statement offered against a party is not hearsay when it “was made by a person whom the party authorized to make a statement on the subject,” under Rule 801(d)(2)(C).

In the Ninth Circuit, voluntarily handing privileged material to the government generally costs the privilege against everyone else too. The Ninth Circuit took up “whether a party waives attorney-client privilege forever by voluntarily disclosing privileged documents to the federal government” in a 2012 decision, In re Pacific Pictures Corp., 679 F.3d 1121, and declined to adopt “selective waiver.”

That’s why I’d treat the first response to any government inquiry as the opening chapter of a private lawsuit. The consent story you tell the FCC has to be the one you can prove in a class action, with the same records and the same dates. A company that overstates its consent records to close an inquiry quickly has handed the plaintiffs their best exhibit. If you’re building those records now, our post on the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule and the TCPA covers the recordkeeping duties. Our post on internal Do Not Call policies covers the written policy a regulator is likely to ask about.

Before anyone answers the government

1. Put a litigation hold on call and text logs, dialer and platform data, and the consent records for the numbers in question, and ask your carrier in writing to keep its own records.
2. Pull the opt-out requests and internal do-not-call list entries for those numbers, with the date each was received and honored.
3. Pull the National Do Not Call Registry scrub records and the version dates used for each campaign.
4. Collect the vendor and lead-source contracts, call scripts, and any recorded or AI-voice message files the campaign used.
5. Talk to a lawyer before answering the carrier, the agency, or the attorney general, and before contacting any consumer or offering anything to settle.

If a traceback is followed by a private suit or proposed class action, the firm’s page on defending TCPA class actions in California covers what comes next.

Questions businesses ask about government robocall inquiries

Do we have to answer a traceback request from our carrier?

The traceback rule binds the carrier, not you. But the carrier has to answer on a tight clock and must know its customers, so a company that ignores the request risks losing service. My advice is a prompt, factual answer reviewed by counsel, limited to what the records show.

Is a Notice of Apparent Liability a finding that we broke the law?

No. A Notice of Apparent Liability is a proposed fine, and the FCC has not made a final determination when it issues one. The company gets a chance to respond in writing before any forfeiture order. If the company never responds, the FCC may affirm the proposed amount, as it did in the Sumco Panama order.

Can the FCC and a state attorney general both pursue us for the same calls?

Generally, yes. The TCPA’s only express limit is narrow: when the FCC has filed a civil action, no state may file its own suit during that action against a defendant named in the FCC’s complaint for the violations alleged there. FCC forfeiture proceedings are administrative, and states investigate under their own laws, so parallel inquiries happen. Keep one set of facts across all of them.

Will cooperating with the government protect us in a private lawsuit?

Not by itself. Documents you give an agency can be discoverable later, and in the Ninth Circuit voluntarily giving privileged material to the government generally waives the privilege. Cooperation still has real value. The FCC’s forfeiture rules list “Good faith or voluntary disclosure” among the reasons to reduce a fine, in 47 C.F.R. § 1.80(b)(11). Just assume everything you produce will be read by the next plaintiff’s lawyer.

If a government inquiry turns into a lawsuit

If your company has received a traceback request, an FCC letter, or a state attorney general’s demand about its calls, the answers you give now will shape any private case that follows. Rosenberger + Kawabata represents businesses defending TCPA lawsuits and class actions through its business litigation practice, including claims that follow FCC or state attorney general robocall investigations. Contact Rosenberger + Kawabata online for a free and confidential consultation, or call (310) 894-6921.

Sources

The statutes are the Telephone Consumer Protection Act at 47 U.S.C. § 227 and the Communications Act’s inquiry and forfeiture provisions at 47 U.S.C. § 403, § 503, and § 504. The TRACED Act is Pub. L. No. 116-105 (Dec. 30, 2019). The FCC’s rules are at 47 C.F.R. § 1.17, § 1.80, and § 64.1200, as published in the eCFR through April 22, 2025. The evidence rules are Federal Rule of Evidence 801 and Rule 803.

The FCC documents are Sumco Panama SA, Forfeiture Order, FCC 23-64 (Aug. 3, 2023); Advanced Methods to Target and Eliminate Unlawful Robocalls, Seventh Report and Order, FCC 23-37 (adopted May 18, 2023); and Enforcement Bureau Public Notice, DA 25-343 (Apr. 17, 2025). The task force announcements are from the Minnesota Attorney General and the California Attorney General (Aug. 2, 2022).

The court decisions are Arizona v. Michael D. Lansky, L.L.C., No. 4:23-cv-00233 (D. Ariz. May 8, 2024) (order denying motion to dismiss), and its July 2024 order (D. Ariz. filed July 8, 2024) dismissing the alter ego theory without prejudice; and In re Pacific Pictures Corp., 679 F.3d 1121 (9th Cir. 2012).

This post is general information about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and related laws as of April 22, 2025. It is not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship. Courts and the FCC change the rules in this area often, and the outcome of any claim depends on its facts. Past results do not guarantee future outcomes.