The FCC's $6 million fine over the Biden robocall survived Steve Kramer's acquittal

The call two days before the primary

On Sunday, January 21, 2024, two days before New Hampshire's presidential primary, a robocall reached 9,581 phone numbers across the state by 7:12 p.m. Eastern.¹ The call opened in a voice built to sound like Joe Biden's, ending in a human recording asking listeners to press two to opt out.¹ Steve Kramer, a Democratic political consultant,² had written the script, commissioned the clone, and directed the call himself.¹

The caller ID was spoofed to show the personal cellphone number of a former New Hampshire Democratic Party chair then leading a PAC urging Democrats to write in Biden's name. She had no part in the call; the FCC declined to name her because her number was used without her knowledge.¹

The script Kramer wrote, later obtained by the FCC through subpoena, argued directly against the outcome the write-in campaign wanted:

Kramer told investigators he had included "malarkey" deliberately, calling it Biden's "signature catchphrase." The script never says Biden's name.¹

A weekend, $150, and a magician's clone

On Saturday, January 20, Kramer sent the script to an acquaintance the FCC's filings call "Individual-1." NBC News later identified him as Paul Carpenter, a New Orleans magician.¹² Carpenter fed the script and a short reference clip of Biden's voice into Eleven Labs' website, a commercial text-to-speech service, and generated the cloned audio. Kramer's father paid him $150 by Venmo, in two payments that same day, for his time.¹

Kramer was, separately, a paid ballot-access consultant that winter for Rep. Dean Phillips's primary campaign against Biden. He said the campaign "had no knowledge" of the robocall, and the FCC's filings do not tie the call to it.¹

By Sunday, Kramer had sent the finished clip, a New Hampshire voter list, and the spoofed caller ID to Voice Broadcasting Corp, which placed the calls over Life Corporation's network. Lingo Telecom, an intermediate carrier, completed 3,978 of the 9,581 calls; the rest passed through providers the FCC's order does not name.¹³

Two minutes of audio and a dollar

A modern voice clone does not need much. Eleven Labs' own documentation says a usable clone can come from "less than two minutes" of reference audio, with anything past about three minutes adding nothing.⁴ The system does not store or splice a recording of the source voice. It learns what the company calls a "representation," a statistical model of the voice's formants, prosody, and spectral pattern that can generate sentences the real speaker never said, filtered through the model's own synthesis.⁴

That is the same underlying trick as a system that turns random noise into a photograph: a network builds a statistical model from real examples, then generates new instances from it instead of recombining the originals. Run on a few seconds of someone's voice rather than a library of photographs, it produces a voice instead of a picture.

Carpenter's own account of generating the audio: "less than 20 minutes and cost only $1," separate from the $150 he was paid for the job as a whole.² "It's so scary that it's this easy to do," he told NBC News. "People aren't ready for it."²

Fined $6 million, acquitted at trial

Twelve days after the calls, the FCC adopted a Declaratory Ruling: the 1991 law banning unconsented prerecorded-voice robocalls covers a voice built by AI too. "AI technologies such as 'voice cloning' fall within the TCPA's existing prohibition on artificial or prerecorded voice messages because this technology artificially simulates a human voice," the Commission wrote, citing the New Hampshire calls as a motivating example.⁵

1. Sun., Jan. 21, 2024

   9,581 calls placed¹

   Two days before the primary, by 7:12 p.m.

2. Fri., Feb. 2, 2024

   FCC rules AI voices count⁵

   AI-cloned robocall voices need the same consent as a human recording.

3. Thu., May 23, 2024

   Indicted, fine proposed⁶¹

   New Hampshire indicts Kramer; the FCC proposes a $6,000,000 forfeiture against him.

4. Thu., Sept. 26, 2024

   Kramer's fine finalized, unreduced⁷

   The Commission assesses the full $6,000,000, unanswered by Kramer.

5. Fri., June 13, 2025

   Acquitted on every count⁸

   A Belknap County jury finds Kramer not guilty on all 22 counts.

The forfeiture's math: a $1,000 base penalty per spoofed call, doubled for egregious intent, applied to a verified subset of 3,000 of the 9,581 calls placed.¹ Kramer never substantively answered the notice, and the Commission finalized the full amount that September: "Kramer did not respond to the NAL. As such, we see no reason to cancel, withdraw, or reduce the proposed penalty, and we therefore assess the $6,000,000 forfeiture as previously proposed."⁷

Lingo's penalty traced to a different failure: it had applied its highest caller-ID trust rating to the batch because its customer, Life Corporation, had falsely certified it had verified the calling number.³ Announcing the settlement, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said, "Every one of us deserves to know that the voice on the line is exactly who they claim to be."⁹

New Hampshire's theory was different. The indictment charged one felony and one misdemeanor count for each of 13 identified voters who received the call, split across four counties: five in Rockingham, three each in Belknap and Grafton, two in Merrimack.⁶ By trial the counts had narrowed to 11 of each. No public record explains what happened to the other two pairs.⁸¹⁰

The defense argued two things: that New Hampshire's primary was a non-binding straw poll the state's voter-suppression law did not reach, and that a message never saying "Biden" does not meet the legal definition of impersonating a candidate.¹⁰ Kramer testified he built the call to demonstrate a danger to lawmakers, not to suppress votes. "This is going to be my one good deed this year," he told the jury.¹⁰ It echoed what he had told federal investigators over a year earlier: he "did not intend to apologiz[e]," and "I believe in my actions and I did them deliberately."¹

None of that touches the federal fine. The FCC's forfeiture rests on a different statute, the Truth in Caller ID Act, with a lower intent bar than the state charges. The Bureau found apparent intent to defraud and cause harm from the mechanics of the call alone: the false caller ID, the false claim that voting Tuesday forecloses voting in November, the false instruction to call the spoofed number to opt out.¹ New Hampshire's jury answered a narrower question: whether Kramer had impersonated a specific declared candidate in an election the state's statute actually covers.¹⁰ The defense convinced it he had not. A federal penalty for how a call was routed and a state acquittal on what the call's words legally were can both stand, because they were never the same question.

The same cheap trick, still working

The FTC has been warning about the same shape of harm since before the robocall existed. A scammer posing as a relative in distress needs only "a short audio clip of your family member's voice, which he could get from content posted online, and a voice-cloning program."¹¹

The same mechanics have already produced synthetic-audio harm outside the robocall context. That same January, a Baltimore County high school athletic director allegedly used an AI tool to fabricate audio making it sound as if the school's principal had made racist and antisemitic remarks. The clip went viral and the principal was removed from his school before forensic audio analysis identified it as synthetic.¹² Two days before Slovakia's September 2023 parliamentary election, a fabricated recording purported to catch an opposition leader discussing rigging the vote. It spread on social media during the country's mandated pre-election media blackout, when he could not easily rebut it through the normal press.¹³

A peer-reviewed analysis of the Slovak vote afterward cautioned against crediting the deepfake alone for the result, calling that reading "reductive" next to the country's much larger pre-existing drivers: low institutional trust, Russia-sympathetic sentiment, war fatigue.¹³ The FCC's ruling reached one robocall. The scam call, the doctored clip sent straight to a phone, and the next election running the same trick are still open.