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Auto Warranty Robocall Scammers Busted
ectotherm writes "The nice people behind the recorded phone messages stating 'By now you should have received your written note regarding your vehicle warranty expiring...' — the ones who instantly hang up when you ask for the name of the company — have been busted. Fox News did a little background digging on the four people charged." Don't know about you, but I received three or four postcards in the mail from these scammers, as well as uncountable robocalls. The FTC says they cleared $10M since 2007.
...went something like this.
"WTH is this? Scammers?"
*Press 1*
"Hello, what's the make of your vehicle?"
"May I ask who I'm speaking to?"
*click*
--
After receiving (and hanging up on) a few more of these calls, I can't say I'm sorry to see their asses getting handed to them in court.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.
I get the stupid post cards too.. Makes me wonder how they know my Honda warranty is going to expire? Despite the fact I purchased the extended manufactor 2 year warranty? The knew about the first year but didn't know about the extended warranty so I can only guess somehow they been digging through public records about car purchases or ca registurations. Sounds like complete invasion of privacy to me!!
However, I never recieved one phone call from folks like that... Hmmm
I know I personally received several hundred calls from these guys. I had numerous people tell me they had received the same types of calls. The FTC can stop patting themselves on the back, the fact that it took this long is embarrassing.
I never understood how these scams work, they hang up on you once you ask anything, but don't you need to know where to send your money? If you just give them credit card info won't they need an address for their merchant account or whatever credit card processing system they have? Why does it take so long to catch these people, isn't it possible to just follow the money to the scammers?
Here's some potential explanations:
Even a blind pig finds an acorn once in a while.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
What really bugs me about all this is that despite what were probably thousands of reports to the gov't, nothing was done and nobody really brought it up in the media until they accidentally bothered NY senator Chuck Schumer. Had they not stumbled onto his number, one wonders if they would still be in business.
What I don't understand is why I, and so many others, got so many calls. I must have received over 30. If these crooks were in business for two years, and made over a billion calls, they were clearly calling everyone they could reach in the US multiple times. Isn't there some point where they hit diminishing returns? TFA says their mantra was "hang up; next" (perl?), that is to not try to convert anyone who sounded remotely skeptical. But if they give up on the sale two second in, why call that same person back, again and again? Had they not called back people they rejected, I suspect that people would be nearly so upset with them, and the FTC wouldn't have gone after them.
I understand that this is an over-reaction, but if they were sentenced to death and I were an executioner I think I would cheerfully pull the switch to fry their brains.
Sad to say, but me too. I would probably add a gleeful giggle as well.
I knew it was a scam when I asked them if they could insure my 10 yr old truck with 175k miles and a blown cylinder and they said they could...
sorry for my comments, I'm drunk
Yup. I even reported a handful of calls to the FTC (using their website) just a few weeks before Chuck Schumer declared war on these guys.
I got a letter back from the FTC telling me that they couldn't do anything because "I didn't provide them enough information". I gave them the time of day, the CID, and what the robo greeting said. But I guess because I didn't talk to a human, it didn't count.
This should be considered a major FAIL for the FTC and the Do Not Call list. Which is a shame, too, because the DNC has been a great success with this exception.
It's embarassing that it took the FTC this long to catch them, and to add insult to injury, it only took them about a month after Chuck Schumer made a stink.
I hope that after these criminals are tried, a second investigation starts to find out why the FTC had their head up their ass.
-David
The real problem here is the phone companies. I tried reporting this issue to AT&T a few times, and found them to be singularly disinterested. They wouldn't even tell me who kept calling my cell phone over and over, trying to sell me the same thing over and over. The scammers were clearly robo calling as they didn't know *who* they were calling. I received from a few to several of these calls each week for several months.
Scams like this undoubtedly generate hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of dollars a year in revenue from long distance and 800 number services, which probably include helping the scam artists hide their contact information from their victims. The phone companies had no interest at all in this problem, even when clearly thousands of legitimate customers complained about it. Not only were they making money from the scammers annoying calls, but the phone company also offered me the chance to pay an additional monthly fee to stop solicitation calls. When I asked point blank, they admitted that the service would not stop the robotic calls about which I'd called to complain. In addition to that, the phone companies were charging air time to victims, when the robotic caller dialed cell phones (like mine).
The phone companies, all of them, are complicit in this scam, and should be jointly prosecuted with the scammers.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
No. See "Common Carrier". You really don't want the phone companies to be able to refuse service to anybody...
The real problem is the government's indifference — took millions of complaints over years for them to enforce the law...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yeah, reporting these guys is usually useless. They spoof the caller ID info (this is where the phone companies should be atomic dope slapped) and the associates, if you get one, are well trained in not telling you anything that would be useful on a report. Full name? Nope. Company name? Nope. Address? Hell no. Return number? Nope.
In reality, if they were taking it seriously all the FTC would need is your phone number, the time of the call, and your provider. Then they could get records from the provider (ie. AT&T) and know where the call came from, who it's registered to, and so on. The phone companies make damn sure to have that info, because otherwise they couldn't get paid.
Which, of course, is why the FTC were able to move so fast once Senatorman got called.
Playing some devils advocate here...
Do the math on some of those.
Bomb threat was in 1991, guilty party is now 36. He was 18.
The indecent was in 2001, again he was 20. One can technically be charged with indecent exposure for mooning someone or forgetting to latch the door on the crapper.
No specifics on the trespassing either.
Battery is a bit more severe, but again no details. We don't know if it was a beating or a fight.
Firearms, likely in relation to the bomb threat but then again it could be as banal as a minor transport violation.
You do your time and you make amends. I'm not excusing it, but we sentence people to X years for crimes with the understanding that after X years they've done their time. Not life. Wait until you make a mistake, or rather "get framed", and have that follow you around forever.
Good show reading the article though, some of those are buried down in the last few paragraphs. I only noted the bullet points early in the artcile
They actually do that all the time. You just don't know about it because you don't get your news about fox news from fox news.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Despite the FCC's claim about automated dialers calling wireless phones, they will just send you a letter that they didn't find any infractions and cite a 1934 communications act. I received that letter (yesterday) when I reported a company using an automated dialer and recorded message inform me that all of my credit cards were in danger.
I think the only reason this one had any action was because it had received national notice when a call came through to a senator, interrupting the water boarding hearings in Congress last month. The national news covered it (briefly), and the FCC was questioned about it.
Why did it take this long to put a stop to this?
It required effort. Mystery solved.
I realize the whole Fox News thing is a running joke, but the joke is a retarded one. It implies that Fox is somehow different than all the others based on its political bias. That statement is almost entirely incorrect. Fox News is no different from every other main stream media source with the exception that some of those other media sources may not agree with Fox News's particular flavor of political bias.
The implication of your statement is that other news sources are not politically biased. You are not only wrong, you are staggeringly, mind numbingly, unbelievable wrong. It just shows that you are unable to separate your political views from reality and the greater good. It does not bother me that you can not separate your political views, that is what makes us human. What bothers me is that you seem to utterly fail to understand that just because other news sources give you a version thats been tailored to only show you the thinks about your team that you like, it doesn't mean your team doesn't fuck up all the same. What bothers me is the fact that you can not over come the 'its my team' mentality long enough to form an objective opinion about the subject matter at hand. You are unable to be objective. When people like you vote, it is not a wasted vote, it is a bought vote. Perhaps not bought with currency that can be used but with the currency of your emotions through the use of not only flat out lies, but deception and more commonly simple omission of details that actually do matter. Fox News does this, no argument there. What might be enlightening for you to one day learn is that so do the others.
If you belief that, you don't deserve the right to vote, and possibly don't deserve the right to make decisions for yourself since having such a belief makes you clearly a complete fucking idiot.
You don't have to believe Fox News ever. You don't have to agree with them or their stories. As with our right as Americans to free speech there is a responsibility of each citizen to not be a fucking idiot and blindly belief everything someone tells us, regardless of what tv channel, newspaper or retarded blog it comes from. Stop being such a douchebag and being so blinded by your political blinders for long enough to realize 'your guys' are feeding you a bunch of bullshit half stories most of the time as well, or if you don't want to do that, at least stop pretending to have a clue.
The rest of us get tired of seeing the same retarded statement over and over again, years after the reason it came into being has been forgotten by the people who keep spewing it. It just makes it obvious you're a pretentious trendy asshole without a clue, I personally find it more rewarding if its not so easy for me to figure you out by a single line post.