Thousands hit by call scams
Telemarketers operating mainly from India conned tens of thousands of consumers in six countries including Canada into buying anti-virus software, bilking them out of “tens of millions of dollars,” the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said Wednesday.
Posing as tech support workers from major computer companies and using techniques to make it appear as if they were calling from within the consumers’ home country, the telemarketers convinced people they had viruses on their computers and after securing a fee of between $49 and $450, they purported to remove the malicious software remotely and then downloaded otherwise free anti-virus programs, the FTC alleged.
“These scams have fleeced English-speaking consumers worldwide, likely to the tune of tens of millions of dollars and resulted in innumerable donot-call violations in the United States,” Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC, said at a new conference in Washington, D.C.
He said a handful of the operations were in the U.S. and the United Kingdom, but the majority were based in India, and they targeted consumers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the U.K.
The FTC called the news conference to announce legal actions against the alleged scammers and said it secured temporary restraining orders against six of the operations and has frozen their assets.
Canada’s broadcasting and telecom regulator was also involved in the announcement and said it is taking enforcement actions against companies based in India for violations of Canadian telemarketing rules by calling people who had registered their numbers of the National Do Not Call List.
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has ordered Pecon Software Ltd. and Avaneesh Software Private Ltd. to stop their telemarketing activities and pay fines of $495,000 and $12,000, respectively.
“While this is a step in the right direction, it is not a panacea,” said Andrea Rosen, chief compliance officer for the CRTC.
“As we all know, it is easy for telemarketers to locate in one country and target consumers in another.”
She said the actions taken by regulators Wednesday would put “offshore telemarketers on notice that multiple agencies are actively monitoring their activities.”
Rosen, Leibowitz and their counterpart, Chris Chapman of the Australia Communication and Media Authority, all said they would be releasing guidelines to help raise consumer awareness about how to avoid such scams.
Frank Torres, director of consumer affairs and senior policy counsel at Microsoft Corp., said the U.S. tech company does not cold-call its customers.
The most important advice, he said, is never to give credit card information in response to a cold call.
“We also receive thousands and thousands of complaints in Canada, and some of them also are difficult to identify, but we do know that many Canadians receive these calls,” Rosen said.