FCC issues historic $300 million fine against the largest robocall scam it has ever investigated

[BumRushDaShow]

13. Here is a good background article on this from a year ago when they were working on it

https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/18/tech/auto-warranty-robocalls-case/index.html

And the answer to your question appears in the last paragraphs of it -

(snip)

Authorities could also look at bringing criminal charges against repeat offenders. In the interview, Yost told CNN that option is still “on the table” for Cox and Jones.

Repeat violations of FTC civil settlements have also been known to lead to criminal contempt of court charges, Evans said. But federal decisions about bringing criminal lawsuits would fall to the Justice Department, not the FTC or FCC. While DOJ has sued some robocallers to obtain their fines, experts like Saunders say criminal prosecution could be messy and time-consuming, when other alternatives already exist.

Even as illegal robocalls appear to be on the decline, said YouMail’s Quilici, it isn’t clear “how steep and sustainable that trend is.” The decline has coincided with reports of a troubling rise in text messaging spam.

As I have posted over and over and over and over and over - (non-enforcement) regulatory civilian agencies (which are most of them) have no authority to bring criminal charges. That falls to DOJ. And there is a whole process to do that AFTER an agency exhausts their own statutory options and procedures (as people saw with NARA and the 45 Presidential Records stuff, where they finally did a referral to DOJ leading to the search and seizure warrants once they ran through their normal escalated compliance requests).