'Free Broadband' Scam Exposed

dslknowitall writes: "It appears that http://www.dslreports.com is first on the crime scene regarding DSLmonster.com's scam to offer free broadband access for the price of only two spam's a day (remember winfire, anyone?). "If you remember back on December 18th we raised the warning flag concerning a DSL provider known as DSLMonster.com, who's business stank of illegitimacy. With a website made up of plagiarized portions of other providers terms of service, and a qualification system that claimed it could provide service to locations like "the dark side of the moon", it appeared to be a scam waiting to happen." Not only a well written piece but lots o' backgroud too!"

Comments

Perhaps they'd use my Cable ISP

[tcd004]

Not@home

tcd004

Irony

[TrollMan 5000]

As it turns out, our scrutiny only helped to improve the scam, as our users nitpicking of the sites inconsistencies provided a template for DSLMonster to author a more convincing website that would appear a month later and would lead to more bilked customers.

I just hope people don't get angry at DSLReports for what they did. They were only trying to provide a service for their readers.

According to the employees of DSLMonster, many of whom seemed to have legitimate DSL industry experience, they claim they were completely unaware of Mr. Dyer's plans...

The Enron defense, anyone? How can people in a compnay not know of the plans by management. Anyone in the billing department, for example, would have seen the excessive billing practices.

at what point did someone get a clue??

[teamhasnoi]

I would think if I was an employee at this company, I'd start to wonder just when we were going to start installing anything.. for pete's sake, you can't tell me the employees didn't have a clue what was going on, unless of course they were too busy bidding on figurines at eBay, and watching their Enron stock plummet....

Where does this come from?

[Christianfreak]

regarding DSLmonster.com's scam to offer free broadband access for the price of only two spam's a day

What a second. The linked article says that customers were double and triple billed. What did they get 4-6 spams instead of 2? Or is this statement wrong and there was a cost for the service?

Not the first time that crooks started a free ISP

[Kiwi]

This is not the first time that the people running a free ISP have, well, less than perfect morals. I know that one of the first free ISPs, back when free ISPs existed on the premise of "Pay us $60 once; have this ad banner up all the time, and get free internet for life", wan run by dishonest people.

While this ISP was not as much of a sham as the ISP the articule links to, they had an executive with access to the company's purse strings. This person outright stole money from the company's bank account for personal use; we are talking about millions of dollars here. Finally, when the company went bankrupt one or two years later, this crook fled the country, and, as far as I know, is living in the Carribian.

Similar to how Enron did things; get a lot of investment money; start a company, hire employees and pay off congressmen to give the company an air of legitimacy; then take as much money from the company bank account as one can get away with. Do this until the company dies and the executives are living in the bahamas.

- Sam

Where do I sign up?

[ArcadeNut]

access for the price of only two spam's a day

I want to lower my SPAM to only two a day! Where can I get that kind of service?

Bad business plan

[Animats]

If they'd provided service to 10% of their customers, and stalled the others, they could have kept this scam going for years. It would be hard to distinguish that approach from "legitimate" DSL providers.

Two spams a day...

[Dead_Smiley]

Can they garauntee this? I pay for my current ISP and get a lot more spam than that. This sounds tempting...