'This Is Your Second and Final Notice' Robocallers Revealed 235
nbauman writes "A New York Times consumer columnist tracked down the people who run a 'This is your second and final notice" robocall operation. The calls came from Account Management Assistance, which promises to negotiate lower credit card rates with banks. One woman paid them $1,000, and all they did was give her a limited-time zero-percent credit card that she could have gotten herself. AMA has a post office box in Orlando, Florida. The Better Business Bureau has a page for Your Financial Ladder, which does business as Account Management Assistance, and as Economic Progress. According to a Florida incorporation filing, Economic Progress is operated by Brenda Helfenstine, with her husband Tony. The Arkansas attorney general has sued Your Financial Ladder for violating the Telemarketing Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act. The Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services investigated Your Financial Ladder, but the investigator went to 1760 Sundance Drive, St. Cloud, which turned out to be a residence, and gave up. The Times notes that you can type their phone number (855-462-3833) into http://800notes.com/ and get lots of reports on them."
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you've got their address.
Now would be a fantastic time to pay them a visit.
You know what we do to spammers.
Shameful (Score:2, Insightful)
It looks as though things in the US are the same as over here in little Britain: it's absolutely impossible to defraud people unless you provide a fake name and address.
Wouldn't it be nice if at least one of the two countries could manage to pay somebody a living wage to actually check company registrations before they're allowed to trade at all, and at reasonably frequent but irregular intervals afterwards? Maybe between the two we could manage it? I think we've got about sixpence available from the taxpayer, how about you guys?
All too much to hope for, I suppose. What fuckups we are.
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:5, Insightful)
In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.
In a perfect world, pervasive rape in jail will not be subject of gleeful jokes (it'd be funny if it weren't a common issue). I would like to see spammers go to jail too, but not like this.
Even better, maybe we can fine spammers for "whatever the made + X%" and ban them from using computers for a while. This way they can work off their debt to society with some manual labor - outside of jail would be fine too.
Supply-side fraud (Score:5, Insightful)
All you dirty hippies who are calling for the heads of these "Second and Final Notice" folks must really hate free-market capitalism.
These are the Job Creators, after all. And anything that's done to stop them is regulation, which is a dirty word.
We need to just let the free market work and these problems will go away, right?
The economics of this crap (Score:4, Insightful)
The sad thing is that there are enough people buying this shit to keep the robocallers and spammers in business.
I routinely get robocalls wanting to reduce my credit card debt. A good trick, since I don't have any. I always wonder how the political polling people can possibly pretend their conclusions have any validity, since everybody hangs up on them.
And so on. A medium that used to be useful has been poisoned by abuse.
I view Do Not Call as intrinsically self-defeating. Like "opting out" of spam, it provides a list of known-good phone numbers. If the robocalls originate from offshore, there is little the local authorities can do about it anyway.
...laura
Re:FFS (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is it that the attack-dog AGs of the world are ready to go when somebody runs wget contrary to a site's terms of service; but people like this are allowed to operate unchecked?
Well, when Florida lumps their "Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services" into one agency, you really can't expect much from them except bullshit.
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:5, Insightful)
In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.
In a perfect world, pervasive rape in jail will not be subject of gleeful jokes (it'd be funny if it weren't a common issue). I would like to see spammers go to jail too, but not like this.
In a perfect world, we wouldn't need prisons, because people would actually obey society's laws and respect the property, dignity, and person of other people.
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:3, Insightful)
You know, that's exactly why I object to the Death Penalty: It's just too easy for the criminal.
And don't fool yourself, it is MUCH more expensive to prosecute a Death Penalty case through all the appeals to the final needle in the arm, than it is to lock 'em up in a tine cell with no windows for a life of ever increasing insanity.
Of course my morality objects to that as well, so when people ask me about the Death Penalty, I simply walk around in circles talking to myself...
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:0, Insightful)
Yeah, because repeated aggravated rape is so a synonym for justice. I imagine that Browning fellow you're so fond of would do something more merciful, like shooting them.
Thank you for speaking up. The world will be a better place when rape stops being a punchline.
Re:Break Their Legs and Put Them in the Everglades (Score:2, Insightful)
The humor in the in WWJohnBrowningDo's message is that the spam e-mail is famous for
- enlarge penis advertisements
- viagra advertisements
- dating site advertisements
A rape is not the point here.