Phone Scam Company Sued By FTC

from the shut-'em-down dept

Back in April we had the story of a Florida company, Epixtar, accused of some really sleazy phone scam, where they would call up businesses to offer them a "free internet yellow pages listing", and would ask a bunch of basic questions to get people into the habit of saying "yes". Then, they would cram a bunch of questions into a single question, with the last one being an obvious yes. The example given is: "You are authorized to make changes and incur charges on your business phone bill and are over the age of 18. I also have your main telephone number as 202 ... Is that all correct?" All of this would be said incredibly quickly, so that it was impossible to understand. They would say this proves that the recipient knew they were authorizing charges on the phone bill. The company is also accused of slipping in the fees at the very end of the call in a matter-of-fact way and then altering recordings of the calls if someone complained, to pretend that the person had approved the charges. After all of that, it still took the FTC some time, but they've now been sued by the FTC and had all of their assets frozen. The company, of course, denies it did anything wrong, saying they provide unnamed "internet services" that companies ask for. Of course, in shutting down this company, I'm sure plenty more will rush in to take its place.

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