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.

Comments

Negative Option

[Detritus]

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.

Re:"tricked into"

[GeekWithGuns]

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.