Illegal telemarketing: Agcom fines the companies that supplied the numbers, the call centres remain unnamed
12 October 2026, 18:19
Today Agcom, Italy's communications regulator, announced two fines decided on 23 September: €700,000 for Retelit Digital Services and €122,500 for Tekmind. The two companies hold blocks of telephone numbers assigned to them: Retelit passes them on to other operators, which make them available to call centres. Agcom's rules require whoever holds the numbers to check that the call centre really calls from those numbers, and does not make an invented number, or someone else's, appear on the phone of whoever answers: that is spoofing. Retelit calls the decision «unexpected, both in its outcome and in its size».
The press release also takes stock of the check at the border. Since 2025 an Agcom decision, no. 106/25/CONS, has required telephone companies to block calls coming in from abroad that show an Italian number.
Between 1 and 18 November 2025, before the block also covered mobiles, 26.8 million calls a day were coming in from abroad showing an Italian mobile number. With the block, 1.2 million get through. Ninety-five per cent vanished: a genuine Italian mobile travelling abroad still gets through, so those calls carried a fake number.
Illegal telemarketing, however, has not vanished. Agcom writes that the filter made it possible «to confine the illegal practice using Italian numbers within the national territory». In plain words: that traffic now starts from Italy, where the block at the border does not reach. Locally sourced.
Inside Italy the check is still imposed by Agcom, but it falls to whoever holds the numbers: Retelit and Tekmind. It did not happen, and Agcom found out from the «numerous reports» of people receiving the calls. Along the chain, from the numbers passed on to operators to the call centres that ring on behalf of whoever has something to sell, the fine hits the first link. The others, in today's papers, have no name.
It is the hardware shop that cuts copies of keys without asking whose door they open: the shop gets the fine. Meanwhile someone has walked into the house, and was working for someone else.
Who loses out is spelt out by Codacons, the consumer association: «double damage», for the users who receive the calls and for the honest operators who play by the rules.
The press release says Agcom was able to «trace the operators and call centres» that broke the rules in Italy. So the Authority knows who the call centres are too, yet it makes public only the names of the two companies it fined. The question goes to its chairman, Giacomo Lasorella: what are those call centres called, and on behalf of which companies were they phoning?
Whoever was paying for those calls is, for now, unreachable.
This article was prompted by a news item published in ANSA on 12 October 2026.