Dish Network Violated Do-Not-Call 57 Million Times 247
lightbox32 writes Dish Network has been found guilty of violating the Do Not Call list on 57 million separate occasions. They were also found liable for abandoning or causing telemarketers to abandon nearly 50 million outbound telephone calls, in violation of the abandoned-call provision of the Federal Trade Commission's Telemarketing Sales Rule. Penalties for infringing on the Do Not Call list can be up to a whopping $16,000 for each outbound call.
.912 Trillion dollars. (Score:3, Funny)
Deesh you have been a very bad monkey.
Re:.912 Trillion dollars. (Score:5, Insightful)
Actual penalty: $57.00
Abandoned calls - heh (Score:2)
95-99% of the calls to my home phone are from robots. Some are friendly robots ("Your prescription is ready at CVS"), most are spammer robots. I finally got fed up and put the number on the Do Not Call List, and the main change has been that more robots call me and either don't play a recording at all, or else play a recording but if I press "1" to talk to their human, never connect me to a human. (And I almost always tell them I want to; usually I'll put the phone down, sometimes I'll chew them out, oft
Re:Abandoned calls - heh (Score:5, Funny)
Karma's a bitch.
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These days that's totally changed, so it doesn't cost them much to make calls and abandon them
More and more robo calls are made from hacked Asterisk servers. This cost them zero yet the owner of the hacked Asterisk server often gets a bill in the tens of thousands.
Also when I get someone calling me and trying to offer me services of some sort, I instantly start talking over them and try to sell them various services my job offers. Two can play at that game.
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In related news (Score:5, Funny)
US deficit problem SOLVED!
Re:In related news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:In related news (Score:5, Funny)
And we only need another 20 to do it to solve the debt problem.
"Rachel at cardholder services" owes me a few billion.
Cardholder services (Score:5, Funny)
Argh. After they say they are calling in regards to my card ending in "...1234" I ask them to identify the bank, at which point they balk.
Likewise, when scammers call me up about my [insert model year] [insert make] [insert model] and how my warranty is up, I ask them to name my warranty company (I know the exact terms and the company, having dealt with them a few times already), to which they have no answer. The last one got angry and hung up after I lectured her on scamming people.
As far as I'm concerned, I fully support the use of our Predator Drone program to identify, locate, and destroy these call centers (who are most certainly not calling from anywhere in the US, let alone near the area code spoofed on my caller id)
Re:Cardholder services (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cardholder services (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be illegal to spoof caller ID. It's fraud.
Fraud is already illegal. Perhaps we should enforce that.
Can't prosecute them if you can't catch them (Score:2)
My assumption, since the entire country has been annoyed at Rachel and her ilk for years, and since the FBI could easily get warrants to search for her even if the NSA didn't pwn the phone companies, is that either
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The issue with a lot of these companies, they operate on the borders of legal and illegal. Like the guy selling Sorney, Magnetbox and the genuine Penaphonics.
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Enforcing that got defunded because big government is too busy going after potheads.
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Does it tell you how much of that "entitlement" spending goes to retirees and disabled veterans? Does it tell you how it's not an "entitlement" but something that the people who receive the entitlement have paid for in either cash or blood?
If you want to fix the budget problem, cut military spending. We spend more on "defense" than the next 5 countries on the list combined.
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Wrong.
Fraud enforcement got defunded because that evil big government has decided to stay in power by handing out Obamaphones to bribe low-information voters into keeping the people in power.
Snopes.com: Free 'Obamaphones' [snopes.com]
Guess how long that took to find? Less time than it took to type this message.
Re:Cardholder services (Score:4, Interesting)
get off my lawn (Score:2)
Of course, I never answer that line either... it is for receiving (*cough*) faxes, and making outgoing calls.
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You only get limited caller ID with cellular. It's not like they do a name lookup (they sure could for landlines callers at least).
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I'm guessing you're not old enough to have ever had analog cell-phone service. I don't recall if caller ID was even offered as an add-on service, but I know I didn't have it with my phone and my service. Vibrating call alert and an 8-character dot-matrix alphanumeric LED readout (so you could attach names to the phone numbers stored in memo
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Or perhaps we should change caller ID schemes? Instead of showing the number that the headers are spoofing, have CID show the actual billing number. That can't be spoofed as easily as the CID headers are.
Some of these lizards route their calls through IP phone systems to help obscure actual origins.
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That would break Google Voice (and also my VoIP service where I spoof to my GV number on outgoing calls). There are legitimate reasons for spoofing caller ID.
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Re:Cardholder services (Score:5, Interesting)
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My new favorite is "The Attorney General's office" notifying me I am going to be sued for writing a bad check in New York. Naturally, I can make it all go away if I send a payment now.
Re:Cardholder services (Score:5, Funny)
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I would ask them if they take a check.
Not just ANY check, an out-of-state, two party, postdated, temporary, third party check. Made out for $2,000 over the disputed amount. For your trouble, please keep $1,000 of it and send the rest back in the form of a cashier's check or money order.
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> Likewise, when scammers call me up about my [insert model year] [insert make] [insert model] and how my
> warranty is up, I ask them to name my warranty company
I had fun with these guys once. I was tired of hanging up on them so I decided to hang on the line and try to get info out of the guy after they thought they might have me. So I get put on with this guy who....asks about my car!
Lol the audacity to claim my warranty was expiring then to not even know what kind of car I have? wow. So I told them
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Oh, they love to be challenged.
I was getting the "we've scanned your computer and there were errors on it" call from "Microsoft", and I played along for a little while. And then when I challenged the guy about actually working for Microsoft, he said something to the effect of the fact that he can't lie because he's from Microsoft.
They reassert the lie as if it somehow becomes truer and less absurd the more they say it.
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Or
We actually pay back 20 trillion.
So who's the genius now? The one who borrowed money and spent it with no intention to pay it back! Stupid Chinese fell for it.
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Printing money isn't defaulting.
I was going with.. (Score:4, Funny)
See what happens when you mess with Fox network?
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Seriously... Fine them and put the company into receivership... to collect... Corps need to learn they are not above the law. Bankrupt a few large companies and they should be less brazen about not giving a crap about anything but how to make money regardless of what they are allowed to do.
Some had fun with one of there calls (Score:5, Funny)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:5, Insightful)
The principals are disposable, interchangeable, replaceable. Fines big enough to cause a shareholder revolt will have a lasting effect, on more than just this company (as the large shareholders of Dish are likely large shareholders of many other companies). Fine em a significant percentage of the market cap of the corporation, and that will leave a mark.
Re:Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:5, Insightful)
The principals are disposable, interchangeable, replaceable.
Just curious, if this is true, why are they paid 100x more than anyone else in the company?
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because the boards are stupid and full of rich people and the only paylevels they see are the executives so they have nothing to compare to and they just shrug and think that's what they need to pay and that they wouldn't get anyone competent at 1/10th of the price(still 10x more than usual well paid employee in the company).
Re:Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:5, Insightful)
Just curious, if this is true, why are they paid 100x more than anyone else in the company?
They aren't. There's a normal "power curve" distribution of salaries. You have to understand that CEOs (and to a lesser other extent senior execs of larger companies) are professional entertainers, just like movie actors and professional athletes, and you'll find the same salary distribution in each of the three groups. Sure, they entertain investors and analysts instead of the hoi polloi but even so.
Sometimes the CEO is a founder, of course, and then his real compensation is as a major shareholder, and any salary is just number games, but when it's not there's a bidding war for those seen as the best. If you can make a company of 100,000 people just 1% more productive than the next guy, how much is it worth to the stockholders to get you instead of the next guy? Of course, it's often illusion, but that's just a risk factor in that calculation.
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/... [zerohedge.com]
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You do realize that a zerohedge link is about as credible as a timecube link, and less entertaining, right? The timecube guy likely gives better investment advice, as well.
Again, the usual cases are either there is overlap between large shareholders and company officers (almost always founders), which can get a bit dirty but is mostly just a numbers game, or there's a bidding war for the guy perceived as the best for the job (how much difference in skill there really is between these guys is an unrelated m
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aaah... ad hominem.. the last bastion of emotional and intellectual cowards.
if you actually read the article, you would see it did nothing but give facts. good luck arguing with those.
Re:Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:5, Insightful)
Just curious, if this is true, why are they paid 100x more than anyone else in the company?
Because if you price a product too low, people think it's not worth anything.
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I think the 2008 crash demonstrated that there are more than a few psychopaths running major corporations. Maybe we should be thankful they're only screwing investors and customers out of billions, otherwise they would have underground lairs filled with kidnapped plus size women putting the lotion in the basket.
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Nah. If you look at the numbers, the p/e ratio of this stock is more than 2x the p/e ratio of Apple. It would take an insanely huge fine to scare away investors, especially those institutional investors who own 95% of the company. This is not a corporation that will bend over for legislators, especially pencil-pushers like the FTC.
Also it makes no sense to adapt a fine to the market cap of a corporation. As an example, Google has 10x the market cap of Dish, but only 4x their annual revenue. Dish also has a
Re:Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:5, Interesting)
would take an insanely huge fine to scare away investors
Isn't that what I was suggesting. A fine of say $3 billion structured over 10 years wouldn't put them out of business, but it would be an ongoing 30% hit to earnings. Even if you think they were going to double or triple before, that will significantly hamper growth just coping with the need to come up with the outgoing cashflow. You'd likely see a longterm 20-30% hit to the stock price. Pension and mutual funds don't just shrug that sort of thing off -- their analysts and decision makers have to look smart quarter-by-quarter -- and will do something about gross executive incompetence of that sort.
I've worked at 2 different companies where the CEO was fired, along with most of the top execs. In one case, most of the board was fired too. CEOs live in fear of that sort of thing - they give 0 shits about what you or I think, but they know who their actual bosses are.
Re:Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:5, Informative)
Dish's market cap is $34 billion. If they fine them $16,000 for of the 57 million calls then Dish certainly won't be making anymore...
Re:Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:4)
They knew the law and they knew how many calls they were making...
Still, I don't want to see all those people out of work, so perhaps they should be forcibly converted to a non-profit until they work off the fines.
Re:Suitable Penalties Need To Be Given (Score:5, Insightful)
They knew the law and they knew how many calls they were making...
They should fine them $1000 per call * 57 million calls = $57 billion.
Prohibited from releasing any employees or managers, altering policies, disposing of any property, or stopping any ongoing business operations in order to pay any portion of the fine. Any amount that cannot be paid in cash within 5 business days, to be settled by constructing a trust and transferring all remaining equity in the company to the trust, with the government assigned secure debt convertible in part or in whole to common shares on demand at any point in time, having value equilvalent to the greater of the number of shares valued at the deficit amount today and the number of shares valued at the deficit amount on the day of conversion.
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What about the employees breaking the law? Are they permitted to release them? Alter their policy of violating the law?
Nitpicking aside, I wholly agree. Although, the idea of forcing them to continue telemarketing and then siphoning them dry does seem somewhat appealing...
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What about the employees breaking the law? Are they permitted to release them? Alter their policy of violating the law?
Only after a conviction. If they want to release those people, they'll have to throw them fully to the wolves.
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Use tithing as a reference. Set the penalty upper limit at about 10% of yearly revenue pretax, and pre double irish. Cancel all outstanding executives bonuses at the C level up to and including today as well.
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Execs should be held liable personally. Shareholders end up taking it in the shorts thanks to the excess legal shielding that incorporation provides, which lets wreckless management sink good companies while the guilty escape with golden parachutes. Oh well.
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I prefer it to the alternative.
So we book the revenue. 800 billion dollars! (Score:2)
They are sending me junk mail for ages. (Score:2)
My last call from Dish Network (Score:5, Funny)
"Are you recording this, or can you set a flag that will cause this call to be flagged for review? Do it now."
"You're calling because I have a listed phone at an address that used to have Dish Network. Yes, there is a Dish dish on the roof; two of them in fact. Despite asking you not to call, you keep calling on average every two weeks. Clearly you hope that those dishes will be turned on again right now. There is no chance of that, but if you call again here's what will happen. I will climb onto the roof and unbolt both dishes, then toss them over the edge onto the driveway. Then I will bust them apart with a sledgehammer and set fire to what parts can burn. Then I will put out the fire by pissing on it. I will save a souvenir, something with the Dish logo on it, and plant it on a pike in my front yard as a warning to Dish sales representatives. Or if you stop calling it the dishes can stay up there and wait for the next tenant. For the last time, please don't call again. Got it?"
I got a laugh from the lady representative and she said 'Got it!"
They didn't call again.
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Re:My last call from Dish Network (Score:5, Funny)
I'm surprised they didn't put you on a special 'call this guy - he's kinda fun' list.
I would have....
Thats odd (Score:2)
I've received all kinds of mail from them and DirectTV, but I've never got a call from them or Dish Network and I've never heard any complaints of people receiving calls from either. On the other hand I get all kinds of calls from car warranty and home security companies.
Most calls not really from Dish (Score:5, Interesting)
The sad thing is, it is very possible Dish will do away with all retailers to help fix this problem, and the small, ethical, local retailers will get thrown out in the wash... This is the complete livelihood for the 5 of us that own and work at our company. We handle some large accts like our state capital, entire state prison system, state University medical center (to name just a few). My boss has built a great little company, it will be very sad to see it taken away as a result of this. This is actually quite scary, we all have over 15 years of our lives invested in this company.
Re:Most calls not really from Dish (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the calls are from telemarketing companies that sell Dish, not Dish themselves.
Who cares? They retained those companies and then didn't do any checking up on them, or they did and they let it continue. Either way, they're responsible.
The sad thing is, it is very possible Dish will do away with all retailers to help fix this problem, and the small, ethical, local retailers will get thrown out in the wash...
Well, to be fair, Dish are massive spammers. What's ethical about the massive volumes of spam that they snail mail out?
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I didn't say Dish (or the telemarketers) were ethical, I said we (our local, family owned company) are the ethical ones
So you're ethical, although you're working with and ultimately for a company which is not ethical? Just doing your job, I know, I know.
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We pride ourselves on the fact that we don't telemarket or lie to our customers. My boss is blown away that anyone would (be dumb enough to) give their SS#, CC#, birth-date, address and phone # to someone that just called them on the phone... Unfortunately people do, and then they have a problem and come to our store, because when they c
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Ok, so to extend your very clever comment, take your place of employment: McDonalds. Basically slave labor... and yet, you continue to work there.
We're talking about the guys who operate the franchises here. The proper comparison would be to opening a McDonald's franchise. People start up a Dish Network installation franchise either knowing that they are spammers, or not caring to find out. They're part of the problem, not the solution.
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If Dish continues to exist, they will continue to need people to install the dishes -- whether they're outside contractors or Dish employees. Either way, you could still continue installing dishes.
If Dish went out of business (and DirecTV's sales didn't increase to take up the slack) and demand for satellite installations decreased to the point where your company went out of business, well, that's the owner's fault for not diversifying.
Regardless, concern for your well-being as a a Dish contractor is not a
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What's ethical about the massive volumes of spam that they snail mail out?
They are just trying to do their part to help fund the post office. Why do you hate postal workers?
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If they could blame this on the subcontractors, wouldn't they have done that already?
Do they have installers themselves already (in competition)? Otherwise I doubt they change anything. (If they survive.)
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Re:Let's forgive Dish and move on (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sorry, I don't get it.
You seem to be implying that I should care that you, an admitted telemarketer, might be put out of a job along with four others.
I just don't understand your position.
I believe his post indicates he is an installer, not a telemarketer. Huge difference as he would be the guy climbing on the roof for people who do want DISH's service.
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My point is, we have played by the rules, care for our customers, don't telemarket or anything like it (door to door etc.) and we are in jeopardy of loosing our business because of the ass hole telemarketers.
As for a car analogy, go step in front of a bus, preferably while it is moving.
Re: Most calls not really from Dish (Score:2)
Make an example of them. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine them to the max and if they shut down, they shut down. That will wake up the rest of the corps that do this.
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A more realistic method of getting corporations to actually obey laws is to hold the people who run those corporations individually responsible for the malfeasance, starting with the CEO. Fine the company too, but fine the executives. And how about a three-strikes law for those executives? Three offenses equals mandatory jail time.
Now that's a three-strikes law I can get behind.
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The quarter ending 6/30/2014 shows Dish Network had a net profit of $213Million. Considering the penalty could be up to $912Billion, a full year's worth of net (not even gross, so the year would be a draw, not even a loss) profit should be the minimum . That would be $852Million, any thing less is just a slap on the wrist.
By the way, the article is from early this morning, but Dish Network's shares are up 3.4%. Clearly shareholders aren't taking this seriously, so why should the company's executives tak
tip of the iceberg (Score:3)
It likely isn't just DISH. I registered years ago with the national do-not-call list years ago and things have always been rather quiet. However, since last year, the number of nuisance calls to my home has increased dramatically. I'd first chalked it up the the elections. But even after the elections were over, the calls kept coming. Sometimes the numbers are spoofed, sometimes its "dead air", sometimes its a recorded message, but they all qualify as the type of unwanted calls the DNC list was supposed to protect us from. A few have confirmed their own similar experience when I complained about my problem on reddit. Does anyone know what the hell is going on with this thing? I'm sure where there is smoke there is fire.
Doesn't Matter. (Score:3)
Until they automate, or at least expedite, the process of a consumer getting fines/money back from the telemarketers and corporations using laws already on the books, this whole DNC thing is meaningless. (Note, all the tools necessary to do this are already in place in some form or another) But that will never happen so truly DNC is, and always has been, a worthless thing.
XM radio is next (Score:2)
The real problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that the phone company is allowed to let callers lie about their identity via caller ID.
If all commercial calls could be incontrovertibly tied to corporate officers, a lot of this nonsense would end quickly.
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Or heck, just hit the phone company execs with a criminal conspiracy to commit fraud charge.
The Irony of Law (Score:5, Interesting)
Dramatized Outcome (Score:3)
Court: Dish, you've been bad.
Dish: Ouch! My wrist!
Dish equity holders: Thank you, Court. The check is in the mail.
In other news.. (Score:2)
Dish Network stock has been going up lately, isn't that crazy
Cost of business (Score:2)
Dish customers... (Score:3)
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Don't make promises you can't keep. Even if you have no intention of keeping them.
Re:= $912,000,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:= $912,000,000,000 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yep. Dish is surely "too big to fail". Large corporations simply cannot be effectively punished. They fund enough political campaigns that legislators will have a definite interest in making sure no truly harmful penalty is ever inflicted on a big company.
Re:= $912,000,000,000 (Score:5, Interesting)
Bull. Levy a fine larger than the market cap of the company (or even greater than the assets.) When they can't pay the company as a whole can go into bankruptcy and the government can be awarded the company as a whole functioning intact corporation (if they don't get it all they can get enough to control it). There is no reason the company needs to be broken up, it's a working functioning corporation. As the now largest owner the government can fire several high level employee including the CEO, dissolve the board and sell all shares to the public. Low level employees with no connection to the crime can continue to work. A functioning profit making concern continues to exist and the shareholders and bond holders get zero'd out, thus providing them with incentive not to be so passive and allow a corporation to do shit like this again next time. The government gets money in the end. It's a win-win-win!
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That sounds so nice, doesn't it...
The law of unintended consequences would kick in... because the minute the government goes around taking companies, everyone else sees this...
Then the government discovered what a great money maker this is, and goes after all companies for anything they might be doing wrong...
It is a bad path to go down... and the people hurt are the employees and customers, not the big fish...
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What you are suggesting has actually been done, in other countries... it isn't pretty...
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The law of unintended consequences would kick in... because the minute the government goes around taking companies, everyone else sees this...
Then the government discovered what a great money maker this is, and goes after all companies for anything they might be doing wrong...
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What you are suggesting has actually been done, in other countries... it isn't pretty...
Countries like the US with asset forfeiture laws creating a special interest group and cottage industry around the legal fiction that your assets are a person and you have no legal standing if they're 'incarcerated'. My introduction was while I was renewing my sales tax license. I overheard a conversation next to me. The person had been pulled over and arrested on invented drug charges which were thrown out in court because they were baseless (it sounded like friends pooled money for a defense lawyer). In t
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There will be a fine, but I'll be surprised if it ends up being more than even $30M.
I think you're right. But basically what that means is that they will only be penalized for 1,875 of 57,000,000 calls. Sends a clear message: please violate this law -- you won't be penalized for 3/1000th of one percent of them.
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