Word: boilers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...decades, Jiang worked in the boiler room of the new China, running soap and candy factories. He spent a year in Moscow learning the wonders of Soviet auto production. He made it to Beijing in 1976 as the administrator of the First Ministry of Machine-Building Industry. It was an unimpressive-sounding title, but it was his first shot, at the age of 50, at the higher ranks of Chinese politics. He was part of the team charged with transforming Shenzhen, a sleepy village across the border from Hong Kong, into one of Deng's first boomtowns, and he eventually...
...fraternity of sorts, says Somers. "There are certain bars in Las Vegas where they are known to hang out." Their shops are a kind of floating network of operations that start up, close and reopen on an instant's notice. When active, they run at a true boiler-room pace. One operation busted by federal agents in Phoenix last year had been logging 3,000 calls a day on just four phone lines...
...telemarketers rarely call victims in their own state. Calling across state lines or from Canada helps them elude prosecution because caller and victim are in different jurisdictions. In the bigger boiler rooms, jobs are specialized. "Fronters" make the initial call, working from lists of entrants into legitimate prize contests or from obituaries, or sometimes just looking through phone books for "elderly-sounding" names like Viola or Henrietta. The Sun City phone book is a scam artist's bible because it lists hometowns and former occupations of seniors. "Closers" make follow-up calls to likely marks; "reload men" make them...
Some of the boiler rooms are specialized, peddling only phony prizes, perhaps, or fraudulent investments or fake charities. Two subspecialty operations are the "recovery room" and the "badge room." The latter is staffed by callers who pretend to be raising money for families of slain police officers, firefighters or other related (and fake) charities. American Eagle Advertising, which employed 60 solicitors in boiler rooms in Arizona and Georgia, raked in more than $9 million in two years of operation, according to a 67-count federal indictment unsealed in June. Reload men and "recovery room" specialists individually can make in excess...
Efforts to protect the elderly are picking up. Senior Sleuths, formed in 1989 by the Florida attorney general's office, deploys 550 people in sting operations to gather evidence against scammers. A.A.R.P. has mounted a reverse boiler-room operation in several states. It phones seniors to warn them that their names appear on mooch lists confiscated by police...