FTC Goes After Scammers Who Blasted Millions of Text Messages

coondoggie writes "The Federal Trade Commission today said it has filed eight court cases to stop companies who have sent over 180 million illegal or deceptive text messages to all manner of mobile users in the past year. The messages — of which the FTC said it had received some 20,000 complaints in 2012 — promised consumers free gifts or prizes, including gift cards worth $1,000 to major retailers such as Best Buy, Walmart and Target."

Re:What about the scammers

[Aryeh Goretsky]

Hello,

Were those the Political Opinions of America [forbes.com] calls? If so, that's apparently a modified "boiler room" type scam where the goal is to get you to purchase a "free cruise" of the Bahamas out of Florida If you take them up on the offer, apparently you get stuck on a ferry and receive a bunch of high-pressure sales tactics to buy into a time share. Here are a couple of blog entries I wrote about them:

• Close call with a Caribbean cruise line scam [welivesecurity.com]
• Press One if by LAN, Two if by Sea [welivesecurity.com]

If you were the victim of such a scam, you might want to get in touch with this law firm [shulaw.com] who is looking into it.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Re:What I don't get is why scammers are tolerated.

[richy freeway]

That's not the scam at all. The software they get you to download is some remote control software, usually legitimate. Something like Teamviewer or Logmein. They then proceed to show you all the "problems" in the event viewer and offer to sell you software and remote support (which you don't need).

I've had quite a few computers come through my workshop where a customer has fallen for this scam. Never found any viruses. The scam is them taking money off you for absolutely nothing. Whether or not they then resell the credit card details, I don't know. But I know that they take payments of anything upwards of £90.