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Text Message Scammer Gets Five Years in Prison (reuters.com)
36-year-old Fraser Thompson is going to prison, according to Reuters, after receiving a five-year sentence for "defrauding" cellphone customers out of millions of dollars. An anonymous reader quotes Reuters:
Prosecutors said Thompson engaged in a scheme to sign up hundreds of thousands of cellphone customers for paid text messaging services without their consent. The customers were subsequently forced to pay more than $100 million for unsolicited text messages that included trivia, horoscopes and celebrity gossip, according to the prosecutors. They said the scheme was headed by Darcy Wedd, Mobile Messenger's former chief executive, who was found guilty by a jury in December but has not yet been sentenced. "They ripped off everyday cellphone users, $10 a month, netting over $100 million in illegal profits, of which Thompson personally received over $1.5 million," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said in a statement.
Thompson was ordered to forfeit $1.5 million in "fraud proceeds," according to the article, and was convicted of conspiracy, wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering.
Seven other people also pleaded guilty to participating in the scam -- and one has already been sentenced to 33 months in prison.
Thompson was ordered to forfeit $1.5 million in "fraud proceeds," according to the article, and was convicted of conspiracy, wire fraud, identity theft and money laundering.
Seven other people also pleaded guilty to participating in the scam -- and one has already been sentenced to 33 months in prison.
Double it or more and it's still inadequate.
Since he was described as an executive of "Mobile Messenger" I'm guessing he ran those scammy text-you-shit services and then signed people up without their knowledge. Pretty much everybody I knew with a phone line (cell or land) got at least one of those damn services stuck on it at one time or another. It was the #1 reason you had to check your phone bill each month. The most irritating thing is that you would then have to call the phone company that would always give you the runaround about how you must have signed up for the thing because they're always legitimate and I'm a bad guy for trying to rip off this poor legitimate business. I mean they have the record of my signup right there showing how I personally clicked the "I want to sign up" box from my home in Moscow in the middle of the night.
I read the internet for the articles.
What I find so very interesting is that the judicial system doesn't seem to equate the overall amount of economic damage as being the same as if done to a single individual. Basically, you give everyone on the planet a paper cut and get a slap on the wrist but if you give one person 7 million paper cuts then it's somehow worse despite being far less damaging by three orders of magnitude.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
"He defrauded 'normal' people by selling them stuff they could get elsewhere if they were willing to put the work in. Like every other company in the world.
Did these people had over CC number? Or of it more likely he had help from the carriers? The last time I heard about these scams they were only possible because companies like AT&T allowed them to tack on charges to your cell phone bill. I don't suppose that practice has ended. I know I still get warnings if I respond to a companies text messages.
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Guessing? You don't know? Oh wait, that's because the article doesn't tell you what he did.
You get signed up for a premium SMS "service" by someone else, with having done anything yourself to subscribe. If you ignore the message, instead of texting STOP, you start getting billed.
I experienced this several years ago. When I was signed up for a premium SMS by someone else, I called up Verizon and complained. Verizon told me they had unsubscribed me and put a premium SMS block on my account. Then they tried to bill me for it, anyway. I didn't end up paying that bill after another, angrier, call to Verizon about the issue.
The scam is that unless people opt out, they automatically start getting billed because someone else subscribed them without their consent.
They cost me almost $20 in overage text fees last month. I disabled text messages a couple of months ago as described here:
https://www.facebook.com/help/170960386370271?helpref=faq_content
But, I'm still getting them.
why aren't the Verizon/AT&T/etc execs who allow this in jail too? Yeah, yeah, we all know the answer. At a certain point the law no longer applies to you. This guy just wasn't there yet.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's a pity you back a traitor and known-fraud having no criminal prosecution whatsoever, but think low-level scammers should get hard labor or capital punishment. You're inconsistent in defense of a known traitor. KYS.
Is this one of those "only in America" things? I've never even heard of that kind of scam
I hope the editor is wrong....$100 million in illegal profits, and only a $1.5 million fine?
No, he actually signed up people WITHOUT asking them. No interaction from them at all.
Vacation time? Look. Idiots! If you are going to scam, scam BILLIONS not a mill or two! Leason to be learnt!
"Prosecutors said Thompson engaged in a scheme to sign up hundreds of thousands of cellphone customers for paid text messaging services without their consent."
"They ripped off everyday cellphone users, $10 a month, netting over $100 million in illegal profits, of which Thompson personally received over $1.5 million,"...
He was charged only $1.5 million despite knowingly and intentionally causing $100 million in fraud? No wonder the fraudsters keep at it. He STILL WON. If he truly received "over $1.5 million" then he had net gain. He committed a major crime. His fines should have been significantly higher. One more case of blatant judicial system failure.
If it takes you 5 seconds to determine a single email is spam and delete it, then a spammer who sends out 500 million emails has basically cost a cumulative 1 lifetime (79 years) in wasted time.
We also do the same thing for financial (white collar) crime. The lifetime earnings for an average American is about $1.5 million. So by that metric, any white collar criminal who causes more than $1.5 million in damage should automatically get a life sentence. But we have this tendency to spread that cost over everyone, so $1.5 million becomes half a cent per American, and we sweep it under the rug. (To be fair, the same standard is used for non-white collar financial crimes like bank robbery. The harsher sentence is for threatening people working at or customers of the bank, not for stealing the money.)
Thank you for the good info, AC. Im an SMS scam noob, and had no clue such shit was possible...
Amazing that that feature is on by default.
As long as he dies in prison before his release date justice will have been served.
I have always wondered why, when sentencing white collar criminals, they don't make the jail sentence equal to the amount of money they stole divided by the average American wage. So for example, this guy facilitated stealing $100 million, and the average US wage is $51,000/year. So this asshat would get 1,960 years in jail, because that is the effective amount of time he stole from his victims. Give him the option of lethal injection, but either way his life should be over and he should die in prison.
The moral of the story is don't steal other peoples money, because money is quite literally other peoples lives, multiplied by a weighting factor of how valuable they are to society (at least for the working people, don't get me started on passive income).
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
Pretty much the way every ordinary human is signed up for a boot on the neck from the government/associated cronies unless we jump through whatever hoop they're being paid to direct us to this month.
Requiem for the American Dream
Exactly. Just like I wrote here, unlike the government he was providing useful or fun services and you always had the option of unsubscribing. This man was a hero, he's a testament to how capitalism is supposed to work but Slashdot's antifa SJW anticapitalists are all about forcing people to pay for things they like like diversity and gun control and healthcare and open source but somehow when it comes to things people want like horoscopes they want it declared illegal.
...go after the idiots that have sent me two text messages from random cell phone numbers lately saying someone is fraudlently accessing my Verizon account, and providing a [RandomIPAddress]:8080 address hidden behind a URL shortener to try and get me to "verify" my information to prevent my account from being suspended.
The moderators are out to prove that Kurtz was right. They will not acknowledge the horror in the mirror, and lash out against those of us with the arrogance to hold the mirror up and dare show them their real image!
Yeap and hosts files.
Requiem for the American Dream
All the autorenewal BS that doesn't have a nice easy way to opt out of autorenewal should be treated with the same jailtime.
What happened to the rest of the $100 million?