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Telephone Scammers Ordered To Pay $50M
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission said a group of telephone scammers will pay out nearly $50 million to settle charges they deceived over a million people in a bank information fraud scheme. As is unfortunately the situation in many of these case, the $50 million restitution, while substantial, is dwarfed by the almost $172 million the FTC says Suntasia Marketing bilked out of its victims." The company used "negative option" programs, including memberships in discount buyer's and travel clubs, to keep dinging victims' bank accounts. The FTC said the eight interrelated companies running the scam employed more than 1,000 people.
Hanging's too good for them!
Isn't there some sort of criminal justice recourse for the victims at some point here? It seems like there should be at least one hotshot DA willing to take up the case. Or am I missing something about their deceptive practices that somehow does not translate to criminal action?
ACK
This sounds like Amazon prime They offered me a free trial before Christmas and I just remembered when I read this. They would have charged me £47.97 if I hadn't cancelled by tomorrow!
They should just ban negative option service contracts. There's too much incentive, even for legitimate companies, to structure them in a way that rips off their customers. I'm tired of being told that all I had to do to cancel was to send a passenger pigeon to Tierra del Fuego between the hours of 0300 and 0400, exactly 13 days before the contract is automatically renewed.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The court's orders include a $171.9 million suspended judgment against defendants FTN Promotions; Guardian Marketing Services; Strategia Marketing; Co-Compliance; Bay Pines Travel; Suntasia Properties; Bryon Wolf; and Roy Eliasson, provided the other restitution money is paid out. Suspended judgments also were entered against JPW Consultants, and JeffreyWolf for $60 million, and against Alfred H. Wolf for $115 million.
So it looks like, once it is shown the $50M is paid, the companies still have a $346.9M bill to pay.
Man... why didn't anyone from these companies call me? Looks like you get twice the amount of money back that you got scammed out of!
1. Get a call from someone offering nifty free thingiojiggas
2. Say 'FREE??? AWESOME! HERE'S MY DEBIT CARD NUMBER!!!
3. Wait for lawsuits and a judge to order the companies involved to pay it all back.
4. ????
5. PROFIT!!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think that my wife was tricked into this one. I'm not sure if it is the same company, but here is what happened to her:
1. Bought Tickets on TicketMaster.com (paid 50% in "fees" - bastards)
2. After she finished paying she was sent to a site where they offered a "free trial" for some kind of discount service. Being that it came after the checkout she just closed the web browser.
3. Company starts billing the card she paid TicketMaster with several months later.
4. We notice the change and have it charged back.
5. They claim we signed up by _NOT_ explicitly doing anything on that page after the checkout. We should have unchecked the "sign me up" and then submitted the form to not sign up.
6. We and our bank disagree and charge them back anyway.
The real kicker is that they never even tried to deliver the login details to their "discount" website to her. I never thought that I could have a lower opinon of TicketMaster, but that did it. Bunch of rat sucking, baby raping, bastards.
[End of diatribe. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming...] - Larry Wall in Configure from the perl
My wife opted to get Entertainment Weekly as a promotion from a Best Buy purchase. It was to be 6 months.
She continued to receive it for 3 or 4 years with no bills and she never got charged or even gave payment information. Because the parent company is the same as for Time Magazine, when she changed her mailing address with Time, EW was also updated.
Finally, we got a bill for EW for renewal for 1 year. I told them the situation and they said ignore the bill. We don't get EW anymore, but it was interesting how they kept sending it for years without even asking for payment.