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.'"

Comments

Shocking!

[eihab]

I remember watching their commercials and going to their website to check it out. The fine print clearly stated that you will not receive their computer printer/combo/etc. until after you mail off the last payment!

I thought to myself, who in their right mind would even consider giving this company a dime, but apparently there were 35,000 such individuals.

The lesson here folks: if it's too good to be true then it probably is.

Re:Shocking!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what user mode in Opera is for. It makes any hidden text or fine print clearly visible in a normal font. I am sure there is a Firefox addon or setting that does something similar, but it is very hard if not impossible to make fine print stay hard to read with any decent web browser.

Re:Shocking!

[slarrg]

No it's not, you do it like this.

Re:I'm fairly surprised, actually...

[barzok]

Actually, Madoff never expected to make it as long as he did. He was surprised it took them so long to catch him.

Re:Immoral people

[Machtyn]

"Policemen and laws can never replace customs, traditions and moral values as a means for regulating human behavior. At best, the police and criminal justice system are the last desperate line of defense for a civilized society. Our increased reliance on laws to regulate behavior is a measure of how uncivilized we’ve become." -Walter Williams, “Laws Are a Poor Substitute for Common Decency, Moral Values,” Deseret News, Apr. 29, 2009, A15

Your statement reminded me of this quote.

Re:Immoral people

[Anonymous Coward]

well, at least they didn't pirate music, because that is the WORST type of criminal

Re:Class Action Laywers and Scammers?

[Anonymous Coward]

OK how about one involving this same guy CEO Joseph K. Rensin.

http://baltimore.bizjournals.com/baltimore/stories/2005/05/09/story7.html

This guy doesn't seem to be very worried about lawyers or the government since he has long since made enough money to live comfortably forever.

Better them than me

[Cajun Hell]

Do you want your parents and grandparents to die, homeless and destitute, because the government failed them?

No, but it's them or us.

People who paid into the system over the 40 or 50 years of their working lives quite reasonably expect to receive the benefits they earned and were promised.

They didn't do that in good faith. They knew it was a scam and cannot possibly work, just as well as we know now.

Why not blame the previous generation? The generation after us sure will.

If we don't end it now, then here's our next choice: do we try to con our kids into being the ones who die homeless, or do we accept that fate for ourselves?

We all know it has to end some day. The longer we continue the lie, the more unbearable it becomes. If we stop lying and our parents and grandparents pay the price, I don't see how that's our fault. They're the ones who tried to stick it to us.

Devils advocate

[Anonymous Coward]

The frailties in question here could have been plugged by their parents in one line: "If it looks too good to be true..."

I demand that people use common sense and take some responsibility. If they don't then we end up with a society where everyone lives to covers their ass.
Bags of peanuts say "Might contain nuts", coffee says "This is hot", people drink 12 pints of larger, then crash Accident and emergency at 3am wasting NHS money because their stomach pump is free (Expat Brit, so I don't care about that one any more).

It's a brutal world out there, but you will mature over the next few years and come to realise that people have different points of view, which you aren't going to change by patronising them.

Re:BlueHippo==BoostCred.com, LLC?

[SeNtM]

The agent told me that they service BlueHippo.


It is a third party corp setup to take the fall should the parent company, "BlueHippo", be sued. That way they can claim that they offered the service in "good-faith", but the third-party was the one involved in the illegal activity.