An auto warranty robocall is a prerecorded call claiming your car's warranty is expiring, inviting you to press a key to speak to a "warranty specialist". It sells a third-party vehicle service contract deceptively marketed as a warranty. The FCC found one operation placed 5.19 billion calls in three months and proposed a record $299,997,000 fine.
We’ve been trying to reach you concerning your car’s extended warranty.
It is quoted in the FCC’s own enforcement release, and it is probably the most widely recognised sentence in the history of telephone fraud. It has been a punchline for years.
It still generated more than eight billion calls from a single operation.
That is the fact worth starting with, because it dismantles the assumption underneath most scam advice. This scheme does not work by being convincing. It works because a prerecorded call costs almost nothing, so a response rate near zero is perfectly viable — and because the thing being sold is not really a warranty at all.
What the robocall generates is a lead: a confirmed, live, engaged telephone number. What is eventually sold, if the call goes all the way, is a third-party vehicle service contract, deceptively marketed as your car’s warranty.
Neighbour spoofing makes the caller ID appear to share your area code. One operation used 1,051,461 unique caller IDs in three months, which is why blocking numbers cannot keep up.
A recorded voice says they have been trying to reach you, posing as a dealer, manufacturer or insurer. The FCC notes that scammers may hold specific information about your car and warranty, which is what makes the call hard to dismiss.
This is the entire purpose of the recording. Everything before it is a filter; the key press is the product.
Where it could have stopped
Pressing any key confirms a working number attached to somebody who engages, which is exactly what is being harvested. So does speaking — including saying “remove me”. The only response that costs nothing is hanging up without saying anything.
Coverage is ending. Records show a final notice. Neither the record nor the deadline exists, and the agent has no access to anything about your vehicle.
A vehicle service contract sold by a third party. The FCC’s finding is that these were deceptively marketed as car warranties — which is the deception, because a manufacturer’s warranty comes with the car and nobody telephones you about it.
The terms that determine what is actually covered arrive after the card details do.
A confirmed engaged line is resold as a lead, which is why answering one of these calls reliably produces more of them.
It costs nothing to fail. Eight billion calls at a fraction of a cent each. The economics do not require persuasion — they require volume, and volume is free.
The premise is true for somebody. Millions of people genuinely are near the end of a manufacturer’s warranty at any moment. The call does not have to be right; it has to be right occasionally.
Neighbour spoofing beats the obvious defence. A number sharing your area code and prefix gets answered far more often than an unknown one — and it frequently belongs to a real person who has nothing to do with it.
The product is real enough to survive scrutiny. Vehicle service contracts exist and are sold legitimately. That makes the pitch far harder to dismiss than an invented product, and it means the victim ends up with something — just not what they thought, and not at that price.
Blocking is arithmetic you cannot win. Over a million caller IDs in a quarter.
And answering makes it worse. The lead is the asset, so engagement is rewarded with more calls.
Unusually for this site, one operation dominates the documented record — and the enforcement against it is the most instructive thing on this page.
The scale. The FCC found the Cox/Jones enterprise placed approximately 5,187,677,000 calls to 550,138,650 wireless and residential phones between January and March 2021 — enough to have called every person in the United States fifteen times in a quarter. Across the whole scheme, the FCC and its partners believed upwards of eight billion robocalls had been generated since at least 2018.
The structure. Ten entities across three countries: Sumco Panama SA and Sumco Panama USA, Virtual Telecom kft in Hungary, Virtual Telecom Inc., Davis Telecom Inc., Geist Telecom LLC, Fugle Telecom LLC, Tech Direct LLC, Mobi Telecom LLC and Posting Express Inc. The dialling ran from Panama and Hungary.
The aggravation. The FCC escalated the penalty for egregious violations, and one reason stands out: the operation called health care workers during a pandemic and spoofed hospital phone numbers, so that people ringing back to complain tied up the lines of public safety institutions.
The prior ban that did nothing. Both principals were already prohibited from making telemarketing calls under earlier FTC actions. The calls continued — which is a plain measure of what an administrative prohibition is worth against an operation dialling from outside the country.
And the one thing that worked. In July 2022 the FCC issued its first-ever K4 Notice and N2 Order, directing every US voice service provider to stop carrying the traffic. The volume of those calls fell 99%.
That is the fastest, most complete intervention documented anywhere on this site, and it worked because it ignored both the callers and the victims. The operators were in Panama and Hungary and hard to reach. The recipients were half a billion people. But the traffic had to cross a manageable number of licensed US carriers — and carriers can be ordered to stop.
US consumers filed 141,902 unwanted telemarketing complaints with the FTC in 2024, alongside 200,331 about unsolicited email and 164,634 about unsolicited texts. None of those figures measures the robocall problem, and the reason is instructive: one operation alone made five billion calls in a quarter that produced nothing like five billion complaints.
On 7 July 2022 the FCC ordered every US voice provider to stop carrying auto warranty robocall traffic from a single operation it believed had generated upwards of eight billion calls since 2018. The volume of such calls fell 99% within weeks — the clearest demonstration on this site that network-level intervention works when it is aimed at the carriers.
In December 2022 the FCC proposed a $299,997,000 penalty — the largest in its history — against the auto warranty robocall operation, having found it placed approximately 5.19 billion calls to over 550 million phones in three months using more than a million spoofed caller IDs. Enough to have called every person in America fifteen times.
On the call. Hang up without speaking. Do not press a key, do not say “remove me”, do not ask to be taken off the list. Every one of those is engagement, and engagement is the product.
Do not answer unknown numbers if you can avoid it; let them go to voicemail. Turn on your carrier’s call-blocking or labelling service, and use your phone’s silence-unknown-callers setting. None of this stops the calls, but it removes you from the pool of people who answer.
If you are actually thinking about a service contract. That is a legitimate purchase, and it should start with you. Call your dealership or manufacturer on a number you look up. Compare what your existing warranty still covers. Read the exclusions before paying anything, and never buy one from a call you did not make.
If you have already bought one.
Register with the Do Not Call list at donotcall.gov. It will not stop an operation dialling from Panama, but calling a registered number is itself a violation, and it is part of what builds these cases.
This is the rarest structure on the site: a scheme whose primary product is not money taken from the person called.
The robocall generates a lead. The lead — a confirmed, live, engaged phone number — is the asset, and it is sold into a market of contract sellers. The eventual sale of a vehicle service contract happens downstream, sometimes several hands away from whoever placed the call.
That is why the FCC describes it as a sales lead generation scheme rather than as a fraud on the buyer, and why the enforcement is measured in calls placed rather than dollars taken. It is also why there is no meaningful loss figure: the money that changes hands is a payment for a real, if oversold, product.
The concealment sits where it always does — in the entity layer. Ten companies across the United States, Panama and Hungary, so that dialling, billing and selling are separated, and no single company failing ends the operation.
The other half of this story
Our sibling site Clean on Paper explains why one operation needs entities in three countries — and why splitting a business across jurisdictions is a defence rather than a convenience.
Not technically — nothing installs and no money moves. What it does is confirm a working number attached to somebody who engages, which is precisely the product being generated. So does saying anything, including "remove me". The only response that costs nothing is hanging up without speaking.
No. They are a real product category, sold legitimately by dealers and insurers, with terms and exclusions. The deception the FCC identified is in marketing them as your car's warranty and implying that an existing warranty is expiring — a manufacturer's warranty comes with the car and is not something a stranger telephones you about.
One operation used 1,051,461 unique caller IDs in three months. Blocking is arithmetic you cannot win. Neighbour spoofing also means the number shown is often a real one belonging to somebody else, so blocking it punishes them and not the caller.
The FCC says directly that scammers may have specific information about your particular car and warranty, and uses it to sound legitimate — so knowing your vehicle proves nothing. Vehicle and warranty data is bought and sold. Treat the detail as evidence that your data has circulated, not that the caller is real.
Yes, once. In July 2022 the FCC ordered all US voice providers to stop carrying one operation's traffic, and the volume of those calls fell 99%. It is the fastest and most complete intervention documented anywhere on this site — and it worked by targeting the carriers rather than the callers or the victims.
Call the dealership or the manufacturer on a number you look up yourself, or check the paperwork that came with the car. Your warranty status is a fact your dealer holds; it is never something you need an unknown caller to tell you.
Report it
Reporting is what produces the enforcement data on this page. Find the right agency and phone number for your country on the report page. If money moved in the last few hours, call your bank first.