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FTC Wins Huge $7.5 Million Penalty Against "Do Not Call" List Violator
coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today said it has won a $7.5 million civil penalty – the largest ever — against Mortgage Investors Corporation, one of the nation's biggest refinancers of veterans' home loans for allegedly violating 'Do Not Call' requirements. According to the FTC’s complaint, Mortgage Investors Corporation called consumers on the Federal Trade Commission’s National Do Not Call Registry, failed to remove consumers from its company call list upon demand, and misstated the terms of available loan products during telemarketing calls."
Now, if they could just get those "This is an automated message from account services... Press one if you would like to lower your interest rates to as little as..." assholes, that would be great...
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
It would be a lot more satisfying to have their PBX system(s) crash repeatedly, preferably during their own dinnertime.
I deny that I have not avoided attaining the opposite of that which I do not want.
is the death penalty for all involved , from top to bottom . who could oppose that ?
Surely Mortgage Investors Corporation pulled in far more than $7.5 Million with this fraud. And they certainly caused more than $7.5 Million in damages to their victims and the rest society by blowing phone spam into the property bubble. What's to stop them or anyone else from doing it again? This should have been a criminal case. Prison for the CEO and board of directors would be more of a deterrent for corporate crimes.
Pro-tip: You can stop saying "for allegedly violating" and start saying "for violating" when the guilty verdict is handed down.
These clowns were systematically violating the law. They should have been shut down.
A dollar and change for every call made to a number on the DNC list doesn't sound like much of a deterrent. Not to mention the additional charges of fraud.
Are these the jerks that call me twice a week with my "final notice" to be able to lower my mortgage and credit card rates? And won't identify what company they are? I'm on the Do Not Call list. I've ignored them for weeks, just deleting their message. I've tried telling them I don't have a mortgage and don't use credit cards. (It's true.) I've asked them nicely not to call me anymore. I've offered to buy them a dictionary so they'd know what "final" means and wouldn't look like idiots. I've told them no way would I do business with a company with ethics like theirs. The last time I talked to someone, she said hurriedly, "You're going to keep getting called.", and hung up. I hope it's them, and they got nailed for every time they called me. Twice. At least. And that this is their "final" penalty, using their definition.
"They have gun control in Cuba. They have universal health care in Cuba. So why do they want to come here?"-Paul Harvey
$7.5 million isn't huge. It's nothing. Compared to the value of the average multinational corporation (eg Proctor and Gamble, Ford, GM, General Electric, the list goes on), it wouldn't amount to a single day's worth of revenue. Take them for every dime, and then another ten times that amount so the executives will have to sleep in the gutters, and be spat upon by us commoners.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
The FTC having won the case, legally it is now fact surely?
It's great to see this and all, but it would be nice if there was an easier way to catch these companies. Most block caller ID, and if they are doing it illegally they're not going to give you their contact info if they sense you are trying to bust them.
The thing that pisses me off about the do not call list, is the fucking politicians have conveniently exempted political calls. When I say do not call me, I mean everyone - no charities, no politicians - EVERYONE. It gets nuts in the month preceding an election.
Now how about the people that were harassed get that money instead of back to the govt coffers. Oh wait, that's not how it works.
7.5 million over the 10 years the DNC has existed? Chump change compared to the profits.
Hell, it surprises me someone hasn't set up a company specifically using the DNC list as their "good leads" list, and budget for paltry fines like this as just part of the cost of doing business.
Even in this case, it sounds like the "lying through our teeth scamming veterans" had much more to do with the size of the fine than any actual impact on we mere humans who have time and again told companies to fuck right off.
Dear FTC: We want you to quit playing games and start jailing executives for such blatant violations. We want you to whack the casual, somewhat-repentant (to whatever extent you can call a sociopathic-by-design entity "repentant") offenders with the "only" 7.5M stick. Get the hint?
I love the arts, and in fact have been to see their excellent plays ... but whoever Huntington Theater Company hire to run their calling campaign (for donations) needs to learn about the law. They've turned this liberal into an avid hater of one of the best theater companies in Boston!
They buy bad loans and expired loans at a few cents per dollar, then resell it to dimwits who fall for "make money from home". These chumps are trained to trawl through the net looking at bulletin boards looking for the names on the loan. They pick on a approximate match, and spam every other poster in that thread assuming they must be somehow connected. One Vijay Krishna has a bad loan. Every one who has ever posted on any thread in any board where anyone named Vijay or Krishna had ever posted become targets of such widespread phone spam. Quite frustrating to deal with. If you ever use the 800 numbers they mention and track down the debt collector, it turns out to be another poor chump who had bought expired worthless loans at 1 cent a dollar.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Answer: you don't.
Like all phone spamming scum, you're lying your arse off.
Google play store
It blocks unwanted calls that YOU specify.
Someone should have lunch, write code on a napkin that provides a block service to home phone users then sell it for a dollar a month to everyone who wants it. It would be nice to have a web portal to login and allow/block your own list of "FRIENDS/FAMILY/ETC"
And have everyone else like "CONFLATULATIONS YOU WON A CRUISE press 1 to pay in Spanish, 3 in French and 7 in English) you'ld just forward that to some message that says "screw you" or you could set or a system messsage that causes them to stay connected, run up their phone bill while it never disconnects on their end. It's their call, they are paying for it, why not make it less profitable?
I get a call EVERY DAY from some automated message telling me "The FBI reports there is a break in every 15 minutes" I have tried asking them nicely to stop calling me, tried cursing at them, tried screaming at them, tried threatening them with bodily harm. They still call me EVERY DAY from a different phone number. I asked them yesterday "You have called me over 100 times and I have not been interested. Did you think maybe if you just called me one....more...time.... that I'd change my mind?" If I knew where these people operated out of, I'd burn their building down.
I have a simple idea for a pretty solid system to deal with all unwanted calls. The idea is that you opt into this system. Then when you receive a call that you don't want you would dial *55 or something. You would never receive a call from that number again but more importantly once some small number of people had *55'd a number nobody who had opted in would receive a call from that number.
This way anybody who makes annoying phone calls would be blacklisted. This would include politicians, survey companies, charities, sales people, even annoying girlfriends. I would trust that anyone who annoys even a small handful of people is someone I don't want phoning me. Charities, politicians, and whatnot would be all indignant about this but if they regularly got *55'd then maybe they should rethink their position in this world.
The key here is no exceptions. I don't want some group self righteously explaining why they should be able to annoy me. Basically I don't want to ever receive a phone call from someone who I don't personally know.
Now, how do we make it so that political campaigns and polls are also not permitted to call numbers on the DNC list??? I LOVE how the lawmakers exempted themselves from the law and now are the worst abusers of all.
Forget the fines that will never be paid. Send everyone at the company to prison and be done with it.
I had to invest in a selective call-blocking phone last year because of this crap. So when does the FTC plan on giving that money to the people who were actually harmed by these bastards? It's gotten so bad that I've filled all 50 memory locations on the phone.
I'm also baffled by the pathetic anti-robodialer contest winners. They all depend on caller ID which only works about half the time.
"DO NOT HANG UP!!..." EFF YOU!! YOU RAT BASTARD!!
Even on Do Not Call Lists those Ass-holes still call. Nothing much worked until I found a good solution (for me anyway). I answer only if I know the caller on my caller ID otherwise I let my answer machine get the call. The message says "You have reached the Ass-Hole Hot Line. It's exciting to get calls from Ass-hole so to be included in the Ass-Hole List leave your name, number and a short message describing why you are an Ass-Hole. It works great !
The only way you can possibly get rid of telemarketing and telemarketing scams is to make it unprofitable.
You can sue and fine as much as you want but as long as people can make money at it they will never stop. The only way they will ever stop is if they cant make money at it anymore. And obviously they are making a lot of money because it goes on constantly.
...and misstated the terms of available loan products during telemarketing calls.
And now we know what the suit really brought in the big bucks for.
This isn't about DNC; it's about presenting misleading information.
I'm waiting for the day that some company really gets busted and taken out of business on DNC violations alone!
Best PR the govt. can get would be to use PRISM to locate these "account services" bastards and Guantanamo Bay their ass.
Like everyone else on the Do Not Call list, I have been supremely irritated by robo-calls and cold solicitations on my phone, usually at dinnertime and often from an organization that has called several times within a single week. When I investigated how to file a complaint against these vermin, I discovered that it was very difficult. It was difficult to discover whom to contact and after that it was a fairly involved process to actually file a complaint. I decided it was easier to just not answer the phone. That is why I am surprised that any of these rats actually were caught and punished. It's good to hear that the forces of righteousness have exacted some kind of penalty -- but, the amount really isn't very much considering how much time they wasted for many, many people.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2012-title47-vol3/xml/CFR-2012-title47-vol3-sec64-1200.xml
this would be
Title 47 - Telecommunication. CHAPTER I - FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION (CONTINUED). SUBCHAPTER B - COMMON CARRIER SERVICES (CONTINUED). PART 64 - MISCELLANEOUS RULES RELATING TO COMMON CARRIERS. Subpart L - Restrictions on Telemarketing, Telephone Solicitation, and Facsimile Advertising.
[voice type="Judge Dred"] THIS IS THE LAW [/voice]
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
There is a cost of business calculation in here that makes the fines look ineffectual, along with a generally sleazy business plan that simply reboots the business in a new office under a new name within days.
What needs to happen is a RICO prosecution which would drag in all the service providers involved with this. ISPs, financial institutions, and all the other generally legitimate businesses that enable this kind of fraud.
When these guys are ALSO getting $100,000k personal fines + 20 years in jail, along with the principal perpetrators of these frauds, it'll get to be a lot harder to run these frauds.
... it's the only way to be sure.
They need to aim their sights at the people who call about your "free" Google and 411 listings (neither of whom are either Google or the phone company).
"Rachel from Cardholder Services" and her clones slowed down for a bit, but haven't stopped calling me. I probably get fewer calls from them these days, and they are obviously under some pressure, because when I tell their robot I want to talk to an operator and waste their time, they curse me out a lot more than they used to for asking whether they're embarrassed about ripping people off for a living.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unfortunately, it's easy to set up shell corporations that can take the risk, and if they're convicted all the FTC gets is a drawer full of paper, and the money's long gone, and a bunch of low-paid call center operators lose their jobs. You have to get at the infrastructure providers, in ways that don't trash legitimate businesses but do penalize the ones that know they're working for scammers, but as technology makes it easier and easier to do distributed call centers, that gets a lot harder.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Some of these people go away, but some of them don't, or they get replaced by clones who are just as bad. They do seem to be under more pressure lately; they're much more likely to swear at me instead of just hanging up than they used to be. Asking if they're embarrassed to work for criminals (or scammers, or to rip people off for a living) tends to get the most anger. Asking if they'd like to make a $50,000 reward for ratting out their employer usually just gets a hangup, but sometimes it gets a confused "Huh?".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Most of these Do Not Call violators aren't just annoying people at dinner - they're scamming the people who do business with them. The DNC violation should be justification for a much more thorough search through their papers looking for that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks