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FTC Targets Group That Made Billions of Robocalls
coondoggie writes Given the amount of time the FTC and others have put into curing the robocall problem, it is disheartening to hear that a group of companies for almost a year have been making billions of illegal robocalls. The Federal Trade Commission and 10 state attorneys general today said they have settled charges against a Florida-based cruise line company and seven other companies that averaged 12 million to 15 million illegal sales calls a day between October 2011 through July 2012, according to the joint complaint filed by the FTC and the states.
Call: Let me ask you a question
Me: Click
They had me so excited it was going to be the ones that are calling me twice a day right now. At least it's not the stupid car warranty scam again.
This space for rent...
Unless they settled to the tune of tens of billions of dollars, I don't see how we're going to make any progress on this.
WTF does "settled charges" mean? Who went to jail? Who was prosecuted? Where and when was the court case?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
All they need to do is to pay the scammers with a CC and watch where the money goes. Then go knock some heads.
As they say, follow the money.
Those calls are still incoming on my phone. Nothing to see here right?
*HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONK* Congratulations, you've won a free cru-- *click*
Like this fine man did.
Then enjoy not hearing whatever they try to sell you over the sound of billing them 10p a minute.
I don't get cruise sales calls -- I get calls for carpet cleaning, construction contracting, phony IRS agents, and phony credit agencies. I suspect many are calling from foreign countries. They obviously aren't deterred one whit by US laws or agencies. I just use a box to screen everything unless it's on a whitelist. And blacklisted calls get a disconnected number signal. For the most part, problem solved but I can see from the call logs who's tried and what scam they are pulling by googling the number. What I wonder is, why haven't we seen a massive bust of robocall scammers by the FBI? A couple of reasons-- one, they're not in the US, two, they're paying for the call, so the phone company is making money off them, and three, rich people are mostly unaffected by and/or oblivious of the problem.
As always, the FTC "settlement" consists of nothing more than the bad guys having to mail a check for the money they haven't yet shipped off-shore and promising to Go Forth and Sin No More. Why does the FTC even bother? How is that supposed to deter anybody?
Such a settlement might make sense if this was some minor paperwork violation of an obscure regulation, but these guys were simply pretending the law didn't exist, yet they still get off with a slap on the wrist.
Who's actually spending money on this stuff?
I get that maybe some elderly people can be victimized by carefully tailored scams that target the elderly, but when some guy from India calls some old white guy in Indiana about his computer, is he really going to buy into it?
And this other stuff about your credit cards, free trips, auto warranty -- who is buying this kind of thing over the phone anymore?
You know when someone gets convicted of computer hacking they often get banned from using computers / the internet. Maybe these guys should get banned from using telephones.
It shows how "effective" the FTC is.
Sorry, but until the FTC has the stones to seize ALL ill-gotten gains, bans the principals from ever owning a phone again, and prosecutes the employees who know damned well that they are violating the law, nothing will change.
I also think that unless these internet phone connections can be forced to provide an ANI (are you listening, SKYPE?), they should be barred from connecting to the phone network.
I also think that the phone companies should be prosecuted for routing obviously false caller ID information.
Realistically, there are NO honest cold-call telemarketers. The law I would like to see passed is that there is a maximum $5 fine for beating the crap out of a telemarketer. And, make it a violation, not a misdemeanor.
We can find robocallers. We just need them to sufficiently piss off a decision maker at the NSA. Then, BRING ME THE HEAD OF "RACHEL" FROM CARDMEMBER SERVICES.
bah.
'Card Services' I will not be satisfied.
Or those a-holes from 'your custom google listing'. I get multiple calls from both, every day, in SPITE of the Do Not Call.
They'll just dissolve, re-incorporate and move on. Corporations are like the wind.
If it hasn't already happened, they'll just pop up under a new name, with a dozen new shell corporations but the same people behind it. Until they actually put some teeth behind the Do Not Call list, it's never going to stop.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
That the SEC and the FCC spent ignoring 99.9999% of the complaints about fraud and bulk sales calls for the last 100 years, it's amazing they've done *anything*.
No? Why not? oh right because they pay the FTC to allow them to use robocalls to harass everyone in the USA.
4 Years ago?
And the FTC is just now getting around to it? Completely inept.
The phone companies are major carriers of internet service. Comcast for example.
So they have plenty of bandwidth available to support these telemarketers, but they wwant to throttle bandwidth of netflix that their customer specifically selects?
so, back of the envelope calculation here, assuming they waste at least 30s of the callees' time for each call before they hang up.
Assuming an average lifespan of 70 for the sake of round numbers, they've wasted somewhere around 52 lifetimes of other people's time.
These people make Jeffery Dahlmer look like a piker. They should be locked in a metal box with spike on this inside. Killing's too good for the lot of them.
I pay to have a phone for my benefit, not theirs.
This is a story about going after telemarketers that made calls from 2012. It's 2015, and my phone is still ringing with robocallers. At this rate, the people calling me now will be fined in 2018...
Like that girl back in middle school she looks good but will not deliver the goods. The government will not act in such a way to discourage the practice. The fines and penalties will be designed to insure that the company made good money and gets to keep almost all of it effectively encouraging them to keep on doing the same nonsense. You can see this same problem with companies like Microsoft that may well have been fined two billion dollars over the decades. Yet the two billion is only an acceptable expense that allowed Microsoft to keep on violating laws and making big profits. Additionally you will find that the government only sues a dozen or so telemarketing firms a year and they only tend to go after the very large companies effectively insuring that more and more companies continue to violate the law. There is no hint of real justice in our legal system or congress.
I currently use a program that blocks calls not on a whitelist, but I miss the power of asterisk. Being able to turn my cell phone into a PBX system and treating the incoming cellular network as just another channel I can manage would be pretty awesome!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Honnnnnnnk
This is your captain speaking!
your computer have a virus. I use Linux.
Can they like target them with guns? Maybe some artillery?
"soulless husk that was formerly human"
Good description of someone who works for a dishonest company.
My guess is that the abilities of the FTC to punish are severely hampered so that they can't be used on otherwise-legit businesses when they do a bad thing.