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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
Asked if I had seen a .. Sandra O'Connor... or something like that. I forget.
It was kinda obvious to me that this was a scam when they told me my warranty for the car was due to expire soon.
I don't have a car.
Waiting for an amusing sig.
I'm so conflicted... Fox News actually reporting something that affects me in a positive way? I don't know how to feel!
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.
Its funny, as soon as the car warranty scammers stopped calling last month, I now get robocalls for some cheapo health care ripoff. On my cell, on the do not call list. So it begins again.....
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?
and there were no criminal charges filed against them.
What I found interesting were the priors for some of these people. You'd expect related charges, but they're totally off-base:
- indecent exposure
- obstruction
- trespassing
- battery
- filing a false report of a bomb
- firearm violations
That's quite an interesting assortment.
And although I got robocalled a lot, I never did get any of their postcards. I'm not on the DNC registry.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
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.
I had this one company rep call me about how I had won 12 free magazine subscriptions for free - yes, that's right! FREE!. Made some 10 minute spiel about how wonderful it all was. All I needed to do was send $12.95 for some processing fee and I'd get my free, yes FREE! magazines.
I asked her, "If I won and my subscriptions are free why do I have to pay $12.95?"
To her credit, she replied, "Because they're free!" (Can't blame a girl for trying.)
Soooo, I reiterated my question a few more times until she hung up on me.
It feels good when I frustrate scammers at their own game. :P
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.
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
I always take my car in for service at the dealership. I just trade for a new car when the mechanics there tell me it's time to replace the blinker fluid. The mechanics let me in on the auto industry secret that once that happens, it's only a matter of time before everything starts breaking down. It's saved me a lotta hassle. Sure, it's more expensive, but this is one of those instances where you get what you pay for.
They didn't know a thing about your warranty. Or your car. The call folks all the time who either have no cars, or ancient cars that haven't had warranties of any kind for years and years and tell them 'your warranty is about to expire'.
They are cold calls. They haven't done any research. Some of the better ones use the same cold reading techniques that psychics do to trick you into thinking they know what they are talking about. They are hoping you are dumb enough to provide the information to them when the call.
They don't know. My warranty expired 2 years ago and I get the cards and calls too. They seem to be mailing/calling people based on year model of the car and normal manufacturer's warranty, then continuing the mailings for several more years in case you got an extended warranty. People figure, "wow, they know when my warranty is up, so they must have gotten some "inside" info from the manufacturer, so they must be legit." It's just a variant of the perfect prediction scam.
They didn't know a thing about your warranty. Or your car. The call folks all the time who either have no cars, or ancient cars that haven't had warranties of any kind for years and years and tell them 'your warranty is about to expire'.
These guys yes. Not all of them. I got a postcard with the make and model of my car and they knew exactly what day the manufacturer's warranty was going to expire. I even bought the car second hand, so it wasn't like the dealer ratted me out. I think it must be DMV records correlated by vin with dealer reported original sales, or possibly just DMV records and assumptions that first registration equals a sale on or about the same day,
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
They didn't know, they just guessed.
For example, I got these calls when I had a 2002 Civic, but the car wasn't under my name; I kept getting the calls after I returned the car to my parents and bought myself a 2009 Civic Hybrid... there's no way that's out of warranty already ;) I tried getting someone on the line (to mess with them) after that, but all I got was a perpetually ringing line. Nobody ever answered.
Usually either your bank/car dealership financial office(check the small print) or one of the big 3 credit record places.
I used to maintain a snailmail catalog list, my boss was frequently considering buying access to lists of buyers of related product X or readers of related magazine Y.
When I looked through some of the options you could get from, say, Experian, I was rather amazed. Recently graduated nurses or lawyers in practice for 10+ years. Age x to y, married or not, kids or no kids, own home/renting, bought a luxury/economy car this year, household income in 5k increments, how many times they'd moved.
Freaking specific shit. Didn't beat the ROI on our "please send me your catalog" list, though.
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.
These people robo dialed the hell out of the 202 area code, starting well over a year ago, and not ending until they were busted. I sat in rooms in DC where I'd get this call, and a few minutes later someone else in the room got it, more than once. There were, undoubtedly, many influential federal government employees, Congresspersons, Senators, an White House staffers also victimized by these calls to their cell phones, both government and private. Why did it take this long to put a stop to this? The world may never know.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I worked briefly for a mail order company that dabbled in [legitimate] telemarketing. The trouble is that the phone company won't provide information about whether a particular number is a cell phone or land line. You used to be able to tell, but after number portability went through, you had no way of knowing. We tried not to call them, and if we were told they were cell phones, we would mark them off and never call them again. However, it was impossible to be 100% sure; what was a land line last year could be a cell number this year..
At least that WAS the situation. Things were in rapid flux. I think the larger data warehouses are putting together lists of cell phone numbers, that you can buy and use to suppress those numbers out of your file; but they're not cheap, and they aren't complete.
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.
The real problem is the government's indifference — took millions of complaints over years for them to enforce the law...
Millions of complaints had nothing to do with it. IIRC, Senator Schumer got one of there calls and the rest is history.
Note to telemarketer: scrub congressmen from phone list.
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
It wasn't the auto warranty scam, but one of those calls was scarily accurate. My wife had just got off the phone with me telling me that our fridge was leaking water and needed to be replaced. (Came with the house and was quite old so it wasn't completely unexpected.) Literally seconds after I hung up, my work phone rang. "If you own your own home, you need to protect against major appliance failure..." The scammers are spying on me!!!! (Do I need to wrap my phone in tin foil? ;-) )
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
When phones were newer it was just a matter of looking at the first 3 digits in some places. Back in my hometown in the mid 90s almost all of the local land line numbers were sure to be a certain couple prefixes, whereas the numbers you got from Verizon were different
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
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.