Three weeks after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr named him Chief of the Enforcement Bureau on August 31 —promising “great wins for the American people”—Hunter P. Deeley, a former Justice Department national security lawyer who joined the FCC as an Assistant Bureau Chief in 2023, signed his first Notice of Apparent Liability (NAL). The target wasn’t Huawei. It was three men accused of carrying two battery-powered jammers into an Irving, Texas, jewelry store at 2 a.m.
The NAL, released Tuesday, proposes a $25,000 fine against the trio for operating the jammers on the 700 MHz band during the alleged September 24, 2025, burglary in an apparent attempt to impede Irving police.
Unfortunately for Deeley, the odds of anyone collecting it border on the laughable. The notice is headed to the three men’s “last known addresses of record,” in a case the FCC built entirely from a year-old Irving police report. The agency’s collection record doesn’t help either: it has yet to see a dime from a $34.9 million Chinese jammer maker or a $116 million robocaller. Deeley shouldn’t expect $25,000 to arrive by return mail.
The NAL, adopted and released September 22, 2026, names Gean Becerra Paez, Juan Becerra Araya and Alejandro Rodriguez Gonzalez and holds them jointly and severally liable, meaning the FCC can pursue the full $25,000 from any one of them.
The FCC’s case is secondhand. According to the NAL, the Irving Police Department filed a complaint the same day as the arrests. Every fact in the notice — the 2 a.m. arrival, one suspect inside the store and two on the roof, the two portable jammers that “appeared to be operating in the 700 MHz band” — is drawn from “a police report provided to the Commission.” Police arrested the three on state charges of burglary and interference with police communications. The NAL does not name the store, and it does not say what the “last known addresses” are, as NALs typically do.
Where the three men are today is a question Wireless Estimator could not answer. A search of the Dallas County District Clerk’s online criminal case records turned up nothing under their names, and no local news coverage of the arrests. An NAL is a proposed penalty, not a final finding; the three have 30 days from release to pay or to file a written statement seeking reduction or cancellation. The Commission’s paperwork does not address whether a certified letter to a year-old address of record produces either response.
The FCC’s collection record is not encouraging
If the Irving fine goes unpaid, it will be in large company. In 2016, the Commission affirmed a $34,912,500 forfeiture against C.T.S. Technology, a Chinese electronics manufacturer and online retailer, for marketing 285 jammer models to U.S. consumers. As Wireless Estimator reported at the time, C.T.S. never acknowledged receiving the NAL; the FCC asked the Chinese government to serve it, as international law allows, and China’s designated authority ignored the request. The Commission entered the forfeiture order anyway and did not say what it would do if the money never arrived.
The pattern is not limited to overseas targets. In 2022, the Bureau proposed a $116,156,250 fine against Thomas Dorsher and ChariTel Inc. for a traffic-pumping robocall scheme, and Wireless Estimator noted then that industry observers generally ignored the FCC’s proposed fines and never collected them. In 2023, the agency hit Queens pirate broadcaster Cesar Ayora with the $2,316,034 maximum under the PIRATE Act—after he had never paid a $20,000 fine from 2015.
The structural reason is the statute itself. An FCC forfeiture against a non-licensee is not self-executing; if the target does not pay, the Commission must refer the debt to the Justice Department, which has to file a collection suit in federal district court. The Supreme Court’s 8-1 ruling in June 2026 confirmed the FCC’s authority to issue these penalties. Still, it also confirmed that a party who wants to fight gets a judge and jury at the collection stage before the fine becomes a binding obligation. DOJ is unlikely to spend a federal courtroom’s time chasing $25,000 from three men it would first have to find.
Why the 700 MHz detail matters
The dollar figure may be symbolic, but the frequency is the detail worth flagging. The 700 MHz band carries public safety narrowband voice channels, Band 14 — the 20 megahertz licensed to the First Responder Network Authority and built out by AT&T as FirstNet — and the low-band LTE layers carriers depend on for coverage and in-building penetration. The NAL does not say which portion of the band was hit, or whether Irving’s officers were on narrowband, FirstNet, or both. It states only that the on-site officers “experienced interference with their licensed communications.” It is spectrum the industry has spent billions deploying on macro towers and small cells, and two portable boxes were enough to dent it at one Irving address.
A “failed attempt” that still caused interference
The Commission’s own narrative also has a wrinkle. The FCC describes the jammers as operating “in a failed attempt to impede law enforcement.” It also states that Irving police experienced interference, and the Section 333 finding rests on that. Read plainly, the jammers apparently degraded police communications without preventing the arrests. The attempt failed; by the Commission’s account, the interference did not.
The math is modest; the calendar was tight
The Bureau started with a $10,000 base forfeiture for unauthorized operation and $7,000 for interference to authorized communications, then adjusted the $17,000 total upward to $25,000, finding that “the deliberate attempt to interfere with police communications during an illegal act constitutes egregious conduct.”
The statute allowed up to $25,132 per violation and $188,491 for a single act. And although the Bureau found a section 302(b) violation for each of the two jammers, it applied the $10,000 operation base only once. For comparison, the Commission proposed $48,000 in 2014 — affirmed by forfeiture order in 2016 — against Jason Humphreys of Seffner, Florida, for running a single jammer on his Tampa commute that also disrupted police radios.
Line up the dates, and the timing explains itself. Section 503(b)(6) of the Communications Act bars a forfeiture against a non-licensee if the violation occurred more than one year before the NAL is issued. The alleged burglary was September 24, 2025. The NAL was released September 22, 2026. Two days.
One more detail from the payment instructions: the FCC’s system caps credit card transactions at $24,999.99 — one cent short of the proposed fine.
Irving is not the only jewelry store where jammers showed up
Three months before the Irving arrests, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, seven defendants were arrested in an alleged break-in at Rodeo Jewelry in La Verne, California, in which prosecutors said the suspects tried to enter through the roof, used signal jammers and cut utility lines and fiber optic cables. The DA’s office said the break-in disabled 911 and internet service to more than a million homes and hospitals. Those defendants, all foreign nationals, pleaded not guilty. The Jewelers’ Security Alliance warned members in 2025 of a rash of professional burglaries from Maryland to California that involved cutting through roofs or walls and using jammers to block alarm systems’ cellular backup.
Nothing in the Irving NAL connects its three respondents to the La Verne defendants or to any organized group. What matters for infrastructure owners is the technique: in La Verne, prosecutors alleged the suspects went after the fiber as well as the airwaves.
Reading it all together
The Commission built its case entirely from a local police report, issued it with two days left on the statutory clock, and is delivering it by mail to addresses a year old, against three men whose whereabouts and court outcomes are not publicly documented. It establishes, on paper, that bringing jammers to a burglary is egregious enough to warrant an upward adjustment. Collecting on that finding is a different matter, and the FCC’s record on that front speaks for itself.
The jammers apparently didn’t stop the arrests. The calendar very nearly stopped the fine — and the mailbox may finish the job.
