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BlueHippo Scam Collected $15M, Only Shipped One PC
An anonymous reader writes "Turns out that those BlueHippo commercials advertising financing for computers and other electronics for anybody, regardless of credit, were way more sleazy than you thought. The FTC is bringing this fraud down, but not too soon. 'According to the FTC, the company's brazen business model continued without interruption after the 2008 settlement. "In fact, in the year following entry of this Court's Stipulated Final Judgment and Order for a Permanent Injunction, BlueHippo financed — at most — a single computer to the over 35,000 consumers who placed orders for computers that could be financed during the period,' the FTC told a court (PDF) yesterday. In the meantime, the company took in a cool $15 million in payments from consumers, who don't appear to have received anything in return.'"
They were so massively overpriced... I wonder how many of the 35,000 actually sent in all the payments?
Also, if they were shutdown... I wonder why their site, http: //www. bluehippo .com/default.asp
still works...
I just went there and clicked a purchase button that said I needed to log in, but my SSN would do just fine to log in.
This is a pretty great scam.
From the court documents linked in the article: Joseph K. Rensin is the sole owner and shareholder of BlueHippo Funding, LLC. FTC 26. Mr. Rensin acted as Chief Executive Officer of BlueHippo from its inception in 2003 until July 20, 2009. See FTC 28 at 7-8; FTC 22G at 3. As CEO, BlueHippo's corporate officers, including the Chief Marketing Officer, reported directly to Mr. Rensin. FTC 28 at 20-22. In addition, Mr. Rensin was involved in BlueHippo's day-to-day operations, "manag[ing] the overall structure and direction of the business" and "overseeing the senior management team in formulating strategy." Id. at 22; FTC 22G at 3.
It is always better to have to give it back then never to have had it. This has gone on for how many years. That money has been divided out to "share holders" and other Intrested parties I'm sure. Don't worry, they will BK before they payback anything in the ball park of Millions to anyone. So, yes it is a rational expectation.
Previously, Rensin operated a collection agency at the same address. He was sued for that one as well. And lost.
I went to their website (Google for bluehippo), and when I clicked "Purchase" I was taken to a login screen.. where my username is my SSN, and password is my mother's maiden name. Yeah, I'll give them some more personal info after I enter that...
Control + Mouse Wheel.
Or Control + + if you don't have a mouse wheel.
Or View -> Zoom -> Zoom In if both options are inaccessible.
The elderly are doing the same thing to workers right now through Social Security and Medicare.
We're promised future product (retirement money and health care) if we make payments up front. And it's unlikely the state will be able to deliver since they've already spent the money.
Sound familiar?
barzok's post is correct, that's basically what Madoff himself admitted.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/bernard-madoff/5928899/Bernard-Madoff-surprised-fraud-was-not-uncovered-sooner.html
Read here motherfucker.
The golden rule works very well, but it only works on a voluntary basis.
See http://godsvaluesystem.com/ for a discussion of "sacrificial love for the benefit of others" as a value system.
There is actually a free book on relationships from that perspective that even a non-religious person would find helpful at http://blackstripespublishing.com/
An excellent suggestion for those who are already using Opera (an excellent browser, don't get me wrong. I adore Opera on my Blackberry and Wii.), but not something you need to switch away from Firefox/Iceweasel/Kin to achieve, or even install an add-on/extension for.
Edit (menu bar) -> Preferences (menu item) -> Content (tab) -> Fonts & Colors (group) -> Advanced (button) -> Minimum Font Size (dropdown list). The default is "None", set it to 10, 12, 14, or whatever is comfortable for your level of vision on your particular display. Kudos to the Mozilla folks for managing to hide that incredibly useful preference so well, but at least you only need to set it once! No additional add-on, extension, hack, greasemonkey script, usercontent CSS entry, etc. is needed.
For those stuck with or who insist on using MSIE, Tools (menu) -> Internet Options (menu item) -> Accessibility (button), then either tick "Ignore font sizes specified on webpages" (which is easy, but is way too global for many people's tastes), or tick "Format documents using my style sheet" and make a simple CSS file that has !important rules for minimum font size. Nope, not user-friendly in the least, but you can at least accomplish it without making your bad situation even worse.
I'm sure there are ways to accomplish this in Safari, etc. without too much effort as well, but you will have to ask Uncle Google for the particulars.
I just called it and got through to someone calling themselves Danny Archer. They did not provide a company name in their greetings instead asking immediately for my first name.
If they're shut down they need to be shut down.
Milli Vanilli: they settled a class action lawsuit.
A more recent example is the class action lawsuit brought against auto dealerships for refusing to disclose hidden points the added to financing charges. "Those few percentage points of interest that dealers add on for themselves - without telling the customer - is called "dealer reserve," and it can add thousands of dollars to the cost of buying a car." http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/01/60minutes/main609870.shtml
Excluding scams from operating businesses seems to me an inaccurate distinction -- an operating business can be a scam. Just look at magnetic arthritis bracelets, or The Secret.
My favorite is Excel Communications -- a wildly successful business that managed to beat Microsoft to become the youngest operating billion-dollar-annual company in history. Their MLM scheme was practically indistinguishable from any gifting club pyramid scheme. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excel_Communications
I do not know of any class action lawsuits against them, but believe there were a number of actions brought against them by state consumer agencies.
After finding it though, what do you do?
I usually run that stuff through EULAlyzer. It doesn't catch everything, but it does spot a lot of dangerous words.
And it even formats the info with 1-10 bar graphs, so if you get a lot of 7's (like eBay's TOS), then you know it's bad.
Er, is this a serious post? You do realize that the link leads to a thumbnail, don't you?
Remove the -thumb part of the URL, and you get something more readable. Still a pretty lousy scan, but perfectly legible.
Those aren't "facts", those are semantic games to carefully redefine terms in unusual ways so your original claim is true by definition, creating a nice, tight circular argument that means nothing.
That's pretty difficult to do without first winning a criminal case. I've experience of one such case - an outfit called "Starving Students Movers" which passed ex-cons off as "bonded" employees, and when the poor customer's stuff was stolen or just broken through negligence, the company paid for damages at a flat rate per pound of weight divided by the total weight of the shipment, calculated to give those customers a few cents for the dollar of value. All of this came out in testimony, and wasn't under seal. But that happened because a lawyer went after them about his friend's stuff, not for any class action. The lawyer knew he had nothing to make, even though it turned out the owners had Millions in assets.
Bruce Perens.