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Smartphone Reseller Cheated Customers Out of Millions, Feds Say (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes:The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued a Nevada-based company called Laptop & Desktop Repair LLC (LDR) for allegedly bilking thousands of customers out of millions of dollars in promised funds for the resale of their smartphones. LDR operated dozens of websites that promised customers high returns for their smartphones and tablets using an instant quote generator. The customers, believing that this website would pay the highest price for their used gadget, sent their phones to LDR. Once LDR received the gadget, it would offer the customer a "revised quote" that was often only three to ten percent of the original quoted price. Customers only had three to five days to dispute the revised quote, the FTC's complaint claimed. The FTC further alleged that when customers would call LDR to request their smartphones back, the company would put them on hold for extraordinarily long periods of time, the call would be dropped, and an LDR employee would say the phone had already been processed. If the customer persisted in threatening to report LDR's actions, company representatives would offer slightly higher resale prices.
This type of thing happens all the time with different products -
IE: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tigerdirect-and-compusa-q38a-pc-buy-back-program/
LDR, owned by Vadim Olegovich Kruchinin.
Sad, this guy is giving Russians a bad name.
When an individual steals it's prosecuted as a crime. Stealing a candy bar can get the thief a year or more in jail. When someone forms a company and conspires to steal it's treated as a civil matter. The proprietors shouldn't be in court, they should be in prison.
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
Sounds like the old "mail us your gold - we'll send you a check" scam.
They did pick a uniquely gullible demographic- People who spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone when they have a working smartphone. These people have proven through their actions that they are unable to make good financial decisions. Good business plan. Learning from the best- Jobs,Cook et al
**Life is too short to be serious**
I'm sure another scummy phone trade-in company will rise up in its place (they also do), so I propose customers send their phones in account-locked; iPhone = Find My Phone active, Android = Gmail account active. Even locked the company will still be able to evaluate the phone's physical condition along with seeing the LCD on and manipulating the touchscreen. Once you're given an agreeable quote and have been paid you can then remotely unlock the phone to complete the sale.
From TFA:
"The FTC said it has received more than 4,000 complaints from customers about LDR websites since 2011."
For organizations like the FTC and BBB, what exactly is the damn threshold for these kinds of regulatory agencies to stop sitting on their asses taking complaints and instead take action?
No wonder Wells Fargo was able to get away with their damn scam for years. Why even bother with anti-corruption policies in business when it's become the fucking status quo at the Federal level.
I will set up web sites that do this with all kinds of things.
Is there a way to see if a website is connected with others in this fashion?
That is a good tip-off that something is fishy if there are a dozen websites for the same market from same person/company.
> For organizations like the FTC and BBB, what exactly is the damn threshold for these kinds of regulatory agencies
For the FTC, which is a government agency, apparently the threshold is about 4,000.
The BBB is not a regulatory agency, it's private-sector group whose members are businesses. For the BBB, the threshold is one - they'll take action from the first complaint. The BBB does three things with complaints. 1) ask the company to resolve the complaint, 2) post the result on their web site, and 3) compile complaint and other information into a rough score which is published on their site. Because the results will be published, companies normally resolve complaints. If tou look on your local BBB web site, you'll probably see that most companies have resolved all complaints to the satisfaction of the customer. Of course, total scam companies probably won't, and you can see the difference pretty clearly.
The FTC is government, so they can take legal action, but it takes years and thousands of complaints. The BBB, a private club, acts immediately, and normally effectively, but you have to actually look at their web site to see that a company is a complete scam.
You don't 'fine' scum like this: you. part. them. out.
That's correct. A BBB, as the name suggests, works to improve business in their area. They are not law enforcement. Criminals are not their area, better businesses areb
There used to be a few services like this that would advertise on television, and had an online quote generator.
This was back when the original i7 processors were new, so I gave them my build to see how much they would offer.
For a new i7 920, 16gb ram, 500gb HDD and whatever the higher-end video cards were at the time, they offered $200.
escrow?
When you steal from one it is a theft, when you steal from a million it is a business.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.