Call-tracking execs plead guilty to powering tech-support phone fraud

Two former executives of a call-tracking and analytics company have pleaded guilty to concealing a years-long tech-support fraud scheme. Ex-CEO Adam Young and ex-CSO Harrison Gevirtz ran C.A. Cloud Attribution from 2017 to 2022, supplying telephone numbers, call recording, call forwarding, and call-tracking to customers they knew were running telemarketing and tech-support scams.

This is enablement liability landing on the infrastructure layer. Prosecutors say the pair advised fraud customers to use “large pools of rotating telephone numbers to reduce complaints and prevent account terminations” — the exact number-rotation pattern that call-authentication and reputation systems are built to detect — and on occasion introduced fraudsters to one another. The FBI’s Boston SAC called the conduct “downright despicable,” noting they “willfully profited from telemarketing and tech support scammers.” The operation included a call center in Tunisia.

The signal here isn’t the scam, it’s who’s being charged: not the call-center operators but the analytics vendor that quietly optimized their number rotation. That’s the same toolset legitimate CPaaS providers sell — pointed at evading the very defenses they help build.