Word: conning
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...told, the Federal Trade Commission estimates, con artists working the phones got away with at least $1 billion last year. Other fraud experts put the total as high as $10 billion. Legislators and law-enforcement agencies have stepped up their efforts to disconnect the crooks, but at the moment they are operating almost with impunity. Says William Sullivan, chief of the Illinois attorney general's consumer-protection division: "Lawyers, doctors, policemen -- every spectrum of society is being taken...
...types of telemarketing cons are being hatched overnight, sometimes abetted by front-page news that provides a convincing sales pitch. After the 1987 stock-market crash shook investor confidence in securities, con artists began pushing such alternatives as rare coins, gold, oil and gas leases, and diamonds. One Tulsa-based telemarketing company cleaned up by selling shares in a "secret process" for converting volcanic sand on Costa Rican beaches into gold. A swindler who had been convicted of selling shares in a nonexistent gold mine continued to solicit new investors from a pay phone in his Wyoming prison...
...Con artists have found a highly receptive audience among the millions of U.S. investors who routinely conduct stock and bond trades over the phone with their brokers. Because it is normal for legitimate brokers to solicit new business by making cold calls, crooks posing as Wall Streeters have talked elderly investors into borrowing heavily against their home equity to buy into schemes touted as surefire. "We are confronted with a national epidemic of truly staggering proportions," says John Baldwin, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, a group of state officials who regulate brokers and dealers...
Millions of consumers have received postcards and telegrams in a fast- growing sweepstakes con that is designed to prompt them to call up the telemarketing crooks. "Mr. Quinn will definitely receive a two-week, all- expenses-paid trip to London," such an announcement begins. Winners are instructed to call for information on how to collect their prize. But when they do, they are informed that in order to "qualify," they must join an expensive travel club and pay "handling fees" of $100 or more, or buy a companion ticket at an inflated price. After the extra costs are added, such...
Most telemarketing crooks insist on payment by credit card. Reason: the vouchers can be cashed in at banks before the buyers have second thoughts. Moreover, purloined credit-card numbers enable con artists to compound the crime -- for example, by charging victims several times for the products they purchase over the phone. By the time the consumers receive a bill, the thieves have disappeared, often without shipping any products...