A former executive at a Wentzville-based broker of auto service contracts warned that its telemarketing tactics appeared to violate federal law, yet the company continued the tactic for eight months after the warning.

Officials at National Auto Warranty Services - now known as US Fidelis - dismissed those concerns after they were told they would never get caught, said Philip Jehle, the former chief financial officer and vice president of operations at the company.

Jehle said he has discussed those issues with the Federal Trade Commission and on Friday met with investigators from the FBI and U.S. Postal Service. He would not elaborate on those discussions. Federal law enforcement officials in St. Louis would not confirm whether they are looking into business practices of US Fidelis or its contractors.

Jehle raised his concerns in a letter dated June 5, 2007 - eight months before the broker said it stopped contracting for telephone auto-dialing services from a Florida firm now being sued by the FTC. US Fidelis gave a copy of that correspondence to FTC regulators, who were investigating whether the Florida firm broke telemarketing laws on behalf of service-contract brokers.

US Fidelis spokesman Ken Fields, of the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm, would not comment on Jehle's letter or the legal issues it raised. He declined to answer several questions for this story and, instead, supplied a statement saying that US Fidelis "required companies working on our behalf to comply with applicable laws and regulations."

Jehle told the Post-Dispatch that he believed Daytona Beach-based Voice Touch broke federal telemarketing laws when it placed calls on behalf of National Auto Warranty Services, renamed US Fidelis in January. Jehle said company executives knew what Voice Touch was up to. He also said he quit the company because of his concern over the calling tactics.

On May 14, the FTC sued Voice Touch and Transcontinental Warranty, a service-contract broker in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on whose behalf Voice Touch had recently placed sales calls. Before working for Transcontinental, Voice Touch worked exclusively for US Fidelis, court records show.

US Fidelis stopped using Voice Touch in February 2008. The company has said that it stopped making any unsolicited, outbound calls about four months later. US Fidelis maintains that it stopped making the calls because it was an ineffective way to reach potential customers.

US Fidelis is the target of lawsuits alleging consumer-law violations over marketing and sales tactics, as well as investigations by the Missouri Department of Insurance and 40 state attorneys general.

In a brief phone interview with the Post-Dispatch, Voice Touch owner James Dunne denied any wrongdoing. He said that from April 2007 to February 2008, his company placed more than 1 billion sales calls on behalf of US Fidelis. Court records show the company paid Voice Touch more than $5.8 million.

The "robo-calls" placed by Voice Touch on behalf of the company included an automated message telling consumers to press one number to be connected to sales agents in Wentzville or another number to be removed from the telemarketers' list. The company's recorded messages sometimes tried to hide the purpose of the call. Records show that one message, for instance, told consumers: "Your vehicle is subject to a recall or a service bulletin. Press 1 for free information on your vehicle."

Those and other tactics rankled Jehle, 51, of St. Charles.

His letter to Dunne was copied to Darain Atkinson, the president and founder of US Fidelis. In the letter, Jehle points to a specific federal law that restricts companies' use of auto-dialers to advertise. He said the law "seems troubling."

Elsewhere in the letter, he wrote that he was concerned that Voice Touch was violating the federal Telemarketing Sales Rule on behalf of the company. The law requires telemarketers to reveal to consumers the purpose of their call and other information. It is an underpinning of the FTC lawsuit against Voice Touch.

Jehle's letter was part of a trove of US Fidelis contracts and correspondence entered into the court record as part of the FTC suit against Voice Touch. US Fidelis cooperated in that investigation by giving documents to authorities, offering a sworn statement by Atkinson and allowing the FTC to depose one of its employees.

Before he sent the letter, Jehle said, he warned Atkinson that he believed Voice Touch was using auto-dialers unlawfully, but Atkinson dismissed those objections. Jehle said he told Atkinson and the firm's other owner - Atkinson's brother Cory - that a similar telemarketing campaign by DirecTV was ruled illegal.

"In a last ditch effort to persuade the owners to discontinue this practice, I wrote this letter to Dunne," Jehle said. He said he hoped his letter would prompt US Fidelis executives to act on his concerns about the propriety of the calling campaign.

There is no reply to the letter in the court record.

Jehle said that, rather than write a reply, Dunne discussed the concerns with Jehle and Atkinson in a conference call. "Dunne claimed that I was making a mountain out of a molehill; and that there was no way for anybody to identify the caller," Jehle said.

According to the FTC, Voice Touch routinely used "spoofing" technology to hide the origin of calls it made. That way, either no number would show up on Caller ID screens or the number that did appear was bogus and couldn't be tracked back to Voice Touch or its clients.

Jehle said that, during the conference call, Dunne tried to reassure Atkinson. Dunne told Atkinson that as long as US Fidelis sales agents hung up on angry consumers before identifying the company by name, "he would be beyond the reach of any prosecution,'' Jehle said.

Jehle said that he was "outraged" by how Dunne had responded to the issues he raised, and that he was disappointed US Fidelis continued doing business with Voice Touch. Jehle said he later pleaded with Atkinson to make changes to the company's telemarketing strategy to keep the firm out of legal trouble.

"When it became apparent to me that Darain (Atkinson) would not make any such modifications, I resigned" four months later, Jehle said.

The company sued Jehle in March 2008 over the terms of his departure but voluntarily dismissed the case two months later. Jehle is now a self-employed accountant.

Also included in the court record is an e-mail Atkinson sent Dunne the day before Jehle's letter. While the e-mail doesn't suggest Atkinson thought the telemarketing might be illegal, it shows he knew it would be unpopular with consumers. "We are about to have a lot more complaints when we ramp things up," Atkinson wrote in the e-mail.

In his March 3 statement to the FTC, Atkinson told agency officials he terminated the relationship with Voice Touch because his company had received "hundreds of complaints from consumers each day" who said they were on a Do-Not Call list or had previously asked the calls to stop.