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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.
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.
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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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.
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.
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perhaps you might want to read the whole thing. His cut was 1.5 million therefore he got fined what he stole (should have been at least double what he stole in my opinion, only losing what you gain is not sufficient penalty), the overall companies profits was 100 million for which many other people are also being prosecuted and I imagine the company will also face heavy penalties.
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.)