Word: phoning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Searles was taken by a telemarketing scam, but he has plenty of company. In the shadow of the fast-growing telemarketing industry, which sold more than $100 billion in legitimate products and services over the phone last year, telephone swindlers are springing up like mushrooms. Telescam artists are bamboozling consumers with pitches about everything from fine art and exotic vacations to time-share condos and precious-metals ventures...
...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...
...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...
Some scam artists pitch legitimate-sounding items over the phone at plausible prices, then send products that bear little resemblance to the descriptions. "Car phones," for example, turn out to be cheap telephones in the shape of a car. One "sewing machine" looks more like a stapler, and the "piano" fits in the palm of your hand. "Home stereo entertainment systems" turn out to be tiny radios, and "satellite dishes" look suspiciously like Chinese woks...
...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...