The FCC Has Fined Robocallers $912 Million Since 2018. It Collected None of It in 2024.

Two days before New Hampshire's 2024 Democratic primary, thousands of voters got a robocall in a voice cloned from Joe Biden, telling them to skip the vote.▸ The FCC traced it to a political consultant named Steve Kramer, proposed a $6 million fine that May, made it final that September, and referred it to the Justice Department that December when Kramer didn't pay. In its own account to Congress, filed December 23, 2025, that referral joins nine others — one of them for $300 million — that have all produced the same result so far: nothing collected. "In 2024," the FCC wrote in its report, "neither the Commission nor the Attorney General collected forfeiture penalties or criminal fines for violations of section 227." That is the plainest sentence a regulator can write about its own enforcement arm.

The FCC can propose a fine, finalize it into a Forfeiture Order, and publish a press release calling it a record.▸ What it cannot do is collect the money — that requires the target to pay voluntarily or the Department of Justice to sue and win. When a target doesn't pay, the Commission refers the case to DOJ. Its December 2025 report to Congress lists every robocall and caller-ID-spoofing case referred that way since 2018 — ten in total, adding up to $911,834,500. The biggest is the $299,997,000 forfeiture against Sumco Panama and a network of shell companies that placed roughly 5.19 billion auto-warranty robocalls to 550 million phone numbers in three months of 2021 — the largest fine in the Commission's history. Close behind is the $225 million fine against Rising Eagle, run by John Spiller and Jakob Mears, for roughly a billion spoofed calls selling short-term health plans, including calls the operators admitted they deliberately aimed at numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry because those calls sold better.

Every name on that list ran a real, working scheme: Adrian Abramovich's $120 million fine came from 96 million "neighbor-spoofed" timeshare pitches.▸ Thomas Dorsher's $116,156,250 fine came from just 20,650 calls — placed to toll-free lines, which carry a steeper per-call penalty. Philip Roesel's $82,106,000 fine came from spoofed insurance-lead calls; Affordable Enterprises of Arizona's $37,525,000 from 2.3 million spoofed telemarketing calls in 14 months. Every one of these cases ended the same way in the FCC's ledger: referred, not recovered.

The pattern predates 2024.▸ A Wall Street Journal analysis of FCC records, republished by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, found that as of April 2019 the Commission had ordered $208.4 million in robocall and Do-Not-Call fines and collected $6,790 — a rate under 0.01%. The Commission's own 2025 report shows the newer, much larger cases haven't broken the pattern. Even a courtroom win doesn't produce a payment: the Justice Department sued Scott Rhodes — fined $9,918,000 for thousands of racist, spoofed robocalls targeting specific towns — and in 2024 won a federal court judgment for the full amount plus an injunction. The FCC's report still counts 2024 collections at zero, because a judgment is a piece of paper, not a payment; DOJ has to then enforce it, against a defendant who was already fined into insolvency once.

The unit that issues these forfeiture orders and decides which unpaid ones go to DOJ is the FCC's Enforcement Bureau.▸ It is losing people. The Commission's own FY2026 Budget Estimates to Congress put the bureau at 191 full-time staff in fiscal 2024, 184 in fiscal 2025, and requests just 174 for fiscal 2026 — a drop of 17 positions, 8.9%, in two years, attributed to retirements, the deferred-resignation program, and ordinary attrition. Its FY2026 budget request is $46.0 million, about 11% of the FCC's total $416.1 million request — smaller than the $123.5 million the agency spends running its own Office of Managing Director.

The gap this leaves is partly filled by industry itself, for free.▸ The Industry Traceback Group, a USTelecom-run consortium the FCC designates as its official traceback partner under the TRACED Act, initiated 3,606 tracebacks of suspected illegal robocalls in 2024 — 131 fewer than in 2023 — and identified 714 U.S. and foreign providers carrying that traffic. Even that private effort is losing ground: only 69% of completed 2024 tracebacks ended in an originating provider warning or terminating the caller, down from 84% the year before. The volunteer network doing the FCC's tracing work is getting less effective in the same years the FCC's own collection rate holds at zero.

Figures cover the ten robocall/caller-ID-spoofing forfeiture cases the FCC's own December 2025 report identifies as referred to the Department of Justice since 2018; the Commission has issued other, smaller robocall fines not referred to DOJ that are outside this count. Dollar amounts are each case's final Forfeiture Order figure and are not adjusted for inflation.