Marketing outfit made 46 million illegal calls
The chair's too good for 'em
A CALIFORNIAN telemarketing company which used automated gear to annoy the world with pre-recorded telemarketing pitches has been fined $180,000 for its antics.
The Federal Trade Commission that Voice-Mail Broadcasting Corporation (VMBC) made 46 million illegal calls using the equipment.
The FTC wanted to fine the company a million dollars but worked out that VMBC and its owner Jesse Crowe had no way to pay such a steep fine.
The calls were flogging debt-consolidation and mortgage brokerage services and other retail and financial services.
According to Network World, the equipment was supposed to leave messages on answerphones and it hung up if it got a human.
This is illegal, as the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rules say that calls should be connected to a human sales representative within two seconds.
Still, the charge of annoying that many people should have been dealt with by crucifixion we would have thought. For a first offence.
More here. µ
Comments
Express Consolidation
A few years ago, I used to receive calls promoting Express Consolidation. And when say calls, it is plurally plural: their automatic dialer was hammering my cell phone number really hard for hours at a time to the point of making it unusable.One time, I turned my phone off for about three hours and when I turned it back on, I had over 150 "missed" calls.
The second and fourth times this happened, I complained directly to Express but I was still hit by a fourth DoS attack, all of which spaced about a year apart.
For the fourth time, I reported the incident to my phone carrier, police, CRTC and had a lawyer send them a registered C&D notice threatening to sue them for $500/call thereafter for their illegal use of ADAD.
Looks like fourth time worked like a charm since it's been about four years since their last call.
As far as I am concerned, marketing companies that use broken ADADs or use them illegally deserve to be fined out of business.