Heeding calls from the likes of reddit, John Oliver and countless others, consumers flooded the Federal Communications Commission website with pleas warning of the perils of deregulating internet providers during the allotted comment period.
Of course, FCC Chair (and former Verizon attorney) Ajit Pai and others didn't really care, and have cast the popular rules as government overreach and brushed off widespread concerns about the possible consequences of repealing Net Neutrality.
Besides, plenty of Americans posted to the site urging the commission to do away with the rules.
…Or did they?
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office found millions of instances of potentially fraudulent comments that may have used personal information of people who did not submit the them.
In all, there were 22 million comments posted on the FCC website, and around 2 million of those may have been submitted using stolen personal information.
His office has already received more than 5,000 complaints from consumers who say their information was used to submit fake comments.
More than 100,000 possibly fraudulent comments came from each the four largest states, California, Texas, Florida and New York.
“I am a service member in the United States Navy. I was… on a flight from Bahrain to Boston at the time the comments were submitted,” read one Florida-based complaint filed in Schneiderman's office.
Some were using the names of senior citizens, minors and even dead people. (Search for your name here.)
“This is my elderly mother’s information. I have verified with her that she did not submit this information,” a complainant from Fort Myers wrote.
A Pew Research Center study also found many duplicate comments, submissions that included "false or misleading" personal information and volumes of comments submitted at precisely the same moment.
FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat who voted against rescinding the rules, said hundreds of thousands of comments came from Russian email addresses.
Schneiderman wrote a letter to the FCC asking that they postpone the vote, which they obviously declined to do.
His concern, he wrote, was that the public comment process was corrupted by volumes of phony comments that may not accurately reflect the public sentiment.
“Millions of fake comments have corrupted the FCC public process – including two million that stole the identities of real people, a crime under New York law,” Schneiderman said in a press release. “Yet the FCC is moving full steam ahead with a vote based on this corrupted process, while refusing to cooperate with an investigation."
Schneiderman has said he plans to sue the FCC over the vote.
This article appears in Dec 14-21, 2017.