Telephone Slamming

Telephone slamming is the illegal switching of a customer's local, local toll or long-distance telephone service to a different carrier without their authorization. The practice grew after the mid-1980s deregulation of the U.S. telecommunications industry and the price wars that followed, with slammers often disguising an authorization form as a contest entry or misrepresenting themselves as agents of the customer's existing carrier offering a better rate. It became the top consumer complaint received by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission in 1996, with more than 16,000 complaints logged that year, and the FCC has since adopted rules against the practice and pursued enforcement actions against carriers that engage in it. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/