Brazil's telecom regulator Anatel ordered on Wednesday (Sept 16) the blocking of calls from two companies responsible for more than 4.3 million calls with falsified caller ID between September 2025 and June 2026. According to G1, the companies are Voros Telecomunicações, which serves firms that make large call volumes, and ELO Contact Center, a telemarketing provider working for carrier TIM.
The practice is called spoofing. Think of a letter with a forged return address: the number that shows on the phone screen is an altered identity, and the real caller stays hidden. Anatel says the practice "makes it difficult to identify the true originator of communications and can be used in fraud or other irregular conduct". The 4.3 million identified calls are only part of a larger flow: more than 203 million spoofed calls whose origin the agency could not trace on its own.
How the block works
In Voros's case, Anatel concluded the company was running an unlicensed telecom service. It holds no outorga, the Brazilian license to operate as a carrier, and rented traffic capacity from licensed firms, as if it leased someone else's plumbing. The agency ordered carriers Algar, Datora and Foco to shut that tap. According to Mobile Time, they have five days to comply, and Voros only resumes operations if it obtains a proper license and implements call authentication.
ELO Contact Center, in turn, made calls with numbers outside sector standards, Anatel says. TIM, the company's partner, was ordered to block for one month the call center's capacity to originate calls on its network, with five days to adopt the measure, according to Mobile Time. In total, the agency issued six precautionary rulings against Algar, Itelco, Surf and TIM, two for each.
The companies' responses
Beyond the blocks, carriers TIM, Algar, Itelco and Surf Telecom must deliver within 30 days reports on the origin of the spoofed calls flagged by the agency, including traffic tied to foreign company US Matrix, which used TIM's network. If they fail, the routes used in the practice can be blocked. The companies pushed back: Voros said it does not serve the public network and that partner carriers are responsible for the origin identifier. ELO blamed a supplier and said it fixed the error. TIM said it had no control over the failure and applied contractual penalties to its partner. Algar and Surf said the calls came from intermediation contracts with third parties. Itelco did not answer the agency's summons.
What we still don't know: who is behind most of the 203 million calls, whether they served scams or commercial spam, and whether Anatel will impose fines on top of the precautionary measures, which are provisional by nature. Itelco has not responded so far.
For readers hoping for fewer spam calls on their phones, the practical reading is patience and caution. The economic incentive is clear: mass callers, like telemarketing and debt collection, profit from volume and from numbers that dodge filters and blocks. Keep treating caller ID with suspicion, even when the number looks like your bank's, and never share codes or personal data over the phone. The next milestone to watch is the 30-day deadline: if the reports do not come out, Anatel itself anticipates further blocks.