Man faces proposed $13 million fine for racist robocalls
A man who telecom regulators say was apparently behind a barrage of racist robocalls in six states — sowing hate in response to the killing of an Iowa college student by an unauthorized immigrant and a white supremacist’s murder trial in Virginia — is facing a proposed fine of nearly $13 million by the Federal Communications Commission.
The man, Scott Rhodes, who anti-hate groups say is a white supremacist and runs the website Road to Power, was “apparently” responsible for more than 6,000 robocalls in 2018 “with the intent to cause harm,” the FCC said Thursday.
The commission said that in addition to Iowa and Virginia, Rhodes targeted people in California, Georgia, Florida and Idaho with the robocalls.
Most recently, Road to Power took credit for a flurry of racist robocalls made to Columbia University employees after Tessa Majors, a Barnard College freshman, was killed in a mugging in December in New York City. The calls, which promoted a white supremacist ideology, were not part of the FCC action Thursday.
The FCC said it traced 827 spoofed robocalls that were made to residents in Brooklyn, Iowa, in August 2018 after the slaying of the University of Iowa student, Mollie Tibbetts, by an unauthorized farmworker from Mexico.
Tibbetts, whose murder has been invoked by President Donald Trump in his push for a border wall, was from the small town.
The commission said Rhodes used an online calling platform to intentionally manipulate caller ID information to display local phone numbers as the source of the calls. That practice, known as neighbor spoofing, violates the Truth in Caller ID Act, the commission said.
“As if this tragedy were not enough, just two days after her funeral, Mollie’s family, friends, and the close-knit community of Brooklyn began to receive a barrage of spoofed robocalls,” Ajit Pai, the commission’s chairman, said in a statement Thursday. “Preying on the tragedy, the calls contained inflammatory prerecorded messages and a woman’s voice apparently intended to impersonate Mollie Tibbetts saying: ‘Kill them all.’ ”
Pai said the caller had been referring to unauthorized immigrants from Mexico.
Attempts Thursday to reach Rhodes, who has used several aliases, were unsuccessful.
It was not immediately clear whether Rhodes will face criminal charges for the robocalls, which the commission said were all made in 2018. A spokesman for the commission said he could not comment about possible violations outside the agency’s jurisdiction.
Rhodes has 30 days to respond to the commission’s findings before the agency votes on the proposed fine. If the fine is imposed and Rhodes cannot pay, the matter would be turned over to the Department of Justice for collection, the FCC spokesman said. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
The Anti-Defamation League, which monitors hate groups, said Thursday that it was critical to hold bad actors accountable.
“It’s a great first step,” Oren Segal, the director of the organization’s Center for Extremism, said Thursday of the action taken against Rhodes. “Hopefully, the message is clear to extremists and bigots who want to use this technology in the future that there are consequences.”