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Feb. 21st, 2005 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cheesymiceFor the librarians and academians on my FL this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education (y'all might already be aware of this scam, but I didn't realize that apparently many of them are mob-related!):
College Libraries Are New Targets of Telemarketing Scams
By SCOTT CARLSON
Rick Anderson, a librarian at the University of Nevada at Reno, says he was suspicious when he got a call demanding that the library pay for a business directory he had never heard of. The woman on the line demanded to speak to the university's lawyer. His suspicions deepened when the caller, who said she was from a company called Pentium Capital, would not give her full name, identifying herself only as "Ms. Larson."
He pressed her for more information, and he did get a phone number before she got huffy.
"Are you refusing to give me the name of your attorney?" she said. Then she said she'd see him in court and hung up.
Mr. Anderson, who has received calls like this several times in the past, says the call fit the pattern of a type of telemarketing scam that has recently hit college libraries and academic departments around the country. A telemarketer calls -- especially during off hours, trying to reach a lower-level employee -- to confirm an address. But after the address is confirmed, the telemarketer might say, "So this is where we should send the directory?" If the library employee says yes, the library will get a bill.
"They will tape record the end of the conversation, during which they go through a script," says Todd M. Kossow, a staff lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission. "Once they send the organization an invoice, they will indicate that they have someone on tape who ordered it."
Telemarketers might also say that they are merely confirming the renewal of a subscription when no subscription exists, he says. Or a company might send an invoice that is made to look like something the library might have ordered. A call for money might come from a "collection agency," but that agency is typically a front for the main operation. Many of the businesses seem to be operating out of Canada, according to law-enforcement agencies there.
Threats and Aggression
"Librarians deal with hundreds of invoices every week, and they think that if they can just get their invoice inserted into that flood, they'll be able to get free money from us," Mr. Anderson says. "Even if we do notice, they think that they'll be able to bully us into paying anyway."
Lately, calls from these marketers have gotten more aggressive, with conversations starting off with the threat of lawsuits or damage to credit ratings, says Mr. Anderson.
Last year the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against two companies, Pinacle Publishing and M.D.S.C. Publishing, that had allegedly defrauded American companies and institutions out of millions of dollars and harassed colleges as part of their schemes. According to court documents, Pinacle, based in Canada, called Montana State University at Bozeman so often that a lawyer for the university stopped taking calls from the company -- and even then, a Pinacle caller once got through using a fake name, and threatened to sic lawyers on the university. Despite the pressure, the university never paid Pinacle.
However, office managers at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of more than 100 universities researching weather and climate, paid M.D.S.C. -- more than once. A document in the case says that an administrative assistant paid the company on four separate invoices, over the course of a year, for a total of almost $900.
After a purchasing supervisor got wind of the fifth invoice and refused to pay it, the company called every couple of weeks and threatened debt collection and legal action.
Ms. Larson first called Mr. Anderson in December. Over the course of a few phone calls, he learned she was from a company called Pentium Capital, which she described as a "collection agency," and that she wanted to talk with the university's attorney about an invoice for the American Directory Listing Service. Whenever Mr. Anderson insisted on more information about her company, she would tell him she would call her lawyer and then hang up. He managed to get a shipping address from a receptionist on one call -- for a shipping service in Michigan that specializes in sending packages through customs to Canada.
One recent winter day, he is happy to let a reporter eavesdrop on one such exchange. As Ms. Larson volleys her threats over the wires from Canada, a listener can hear a din of conversations and ringing phones around her, as if she is in a room full of people making calls.
It turns out that Pentium Capital is located outside Montreal, which authorities say is a hotbed for telephone-scam operations. A call to the company's number leads to a voicemail service that bids a welcome to "our corporate offices," but gives no name of a corporation.
When called by a reporter, a receptionist, reached by pressing zero, is cagey -- she won't transfer the call to a manager or a live person, and she won't give her name. She says that she is merely an answering service for five different companies, although she can look up details on your account, if you can provide her with an invoice or phone number. She quickly hangs up when a reporter presses for more information.
Records kept by the Better Business Bureau in Montreal list someone named Mario Del Grosso as the president, secretary, and treasurer of Pentium Capital.
Ties to Organized Crime
Staff Sgt. Barry Elliott, of the Ontario Provincial Police, is in charge of Phonebusters, a hot-line service that gathers tips on telephone scams. He says that his organization has already collected more than two dozen complaints connected to Pentium Capital's phone number -- comprising three business-directory scams and one credit-card scam, but he will not elaborate on the details of an investigation.
He says telephone scams have proliferated in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver because of light sentences for fraud convictions in Canada.
In almost all cases, he says, the con artists are Canadians, and frequently they are connected to organized crime. "We have Italian organized crime, Jewish organized crime, bikers, and Jamaican organized crime," he says. "There is usually violence involved. When we take an operation down, we have to go in with tactical units, and we usually find guns."
Those operations can be lucrative. "When you look at these telemarketing scams, they may be getting anywhere from $300 to $1,000 per hit," Sargeant Elliott says. "That doesn't sound like a lot, but there are hundreds or thousands of victims, so that's a lot of money." A telephone scam busted in Montreal earlier this month had bilked American companies out of some $45-million, authorities say.
"There are simply so many rooms operating on any given day in this area, we don't have enough resources to take them all down," he says. "We're simply nibbling away."
In the meantime, he says, the best way to fight fraud is to inform employees.
At Washington University in St. Louis, the purchasing department has set up a Web site describing various fraud schemes, listing names of companies to avoid, and providing links to pages describing the latest scams.
"We try to educate our departments about these scams," says Gregory G. Mosley, the associate director of purchasing services. Instances of departments falling prey to the companies have gone down, but it is always a challenge to get the word out and keep track of orders in the decentralized environment of a university.
Now and then, he says, his office will catch a payment that is going out to a suspect company.
If a department gets tangled up with a harassing scam operation, "we'll make contact with the company and hope that we can throw our weight around," he says. "Sometimes a few cease-and-desist letters will do it."
"They are certainly pushy," he says of the companies he has dealt with. "That's how they often get people to give in."
God I really hate this kind of crap.
College Libraries Are New Targets of Telemarketing Scams
By SCOTT CARLSON
Rick Anderson, a librarian at the University of Nevada at Reno, says he was suspicious when he got a call demanding that the library pay for a business directory he had never heard of. The woman on the line demanded to speak to the university's lawyer. His suspicions deepened when the caller, who said she was from a company called Pentium Capital, would not give her full name, identifying herself only as "Ms. Larson."
He pressed her for more information, and he did get a phone number before she got huffy.
"Are you refusing to give me the name of your attorney?" she said. Then she said she'd see him in court and hung up.
Mr. Anderson, who has received calls like this several times in the past, says the call fit the pattern of a type of telemarketing scam that has recently hit college libraries and academic departments around the country. A telemarketer calls -- especially during off hours, trying to reach a lower-level employee -- to confirm an address. But after the address is confirmed, the telemarketer might say, "So this is where we should send the directory?" If the library employee says yes, the library will get a bill.
"They will tape record the end of the conversation, during which they go through a script," says Todd M. Kossow, a staff lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission. "Once they send the organization an invoice, they will indicate that they have someone on tape who ordered it."
Telemarketers might also say that they are merely confirming the renewal of a subscription when no subscription exists, he says. Or a company might send an invoice that is made to look like something the library might have ordered. A call for money might come from a "collection agency," but that agency is typically a front for the main operation. Many of the businesses seem to be operating out of Canada, according to law-enforcement agencies there.
Threats and Aggression
"Librarians deal with hundreds of invoices every week, and they think that if they can just get their invoice inserted into that flood, they'll be able to get free money from us," Mr. Anderson says. "Even if we do notice, they think that they'll be able to bully us into paying anyway."
Lately, calls from these marketers have gotten more aggressive, with conversations starting off with the threat of lawsuits or damage to credit ratings, says Mr. Anderson.
Last year the Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit against two companies, Pinacle Publishing and M.D.S.C. Publishing, that had allegedly defrauded American companies and institutions out of millions of dollars and harassed colleges as part of their schemes. According to court documents, Pinacle, based in Canada, called Montana State University at Bozeman so often that a lawyer for the university stopped taking calls from the company -- and even then, a Pinacle caller once got through using a fake name, and threatened to sic lawyers on the university. Despite the pressure, the university never paid Pinacle.
However, office managers at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, a consortium of more than 100 universities researching weather and climate, paid M.D.S.C. -- more than once. A document in the case says that an administrative assistant paid the company on four separate invoices, over the course of a year, for a total of almost $900.
After a purchasing supervisor got wind of the fifth invoice and refused to pay it, the company called every couple of weeks and threatened debt collection and legal action.
Ms. Larson first called Mr. Anderson in December. Over the course of a few phone calls, he learned she was from a company called Pentium Capital, which she described as a "collection agency," and that she wanted to talk with the university's attorney about an invoice for the American Directory Listing Service. Whenever Mr. Anderson insisted on more information about her company, she would tell him she would call her lawyer and then hang up. He managed to get a shipping address from a receptionist on one call -- for a shipping service in Michigan that specializes in sending packages through customs to Canada.
One recent winter day, he is happy to let a reporter eavesdrop on one such exchange. As Ms. Larson volleys her threats over the wires from Canada, a listener can hear a din of conversations and ringing phones around her, as if she is in a room full of people making calls.
It turns out that Pentium Capital is located outside Montreal, which authorities say is a hotbed for telephone-scam operations. A call to the company's number leads to a voicemail service that bids a welcome to "our corporate offices," but gives no name of a corporation.
When called by a reporter, a receptionist, reached by pressing zero, is cagey -- she won't transfer the call to a manager or a live person, and she won't give her name. She says that she is merely an answering service for five different companies, although she can look up details on your account, if you can provide her with an invoice or phone number. She quickly hangs up when a reporter presses for more information.
Records kept by the Better Business Bureau in Montreal list someone named Mario Del Grosso as the president, secretary, and treasurer of Pentium Capital.
Ties to Organized Crime
Staff Sgt. Barry Elliott, of the Ontario Provincial Police, is in charge of Phonebusters, a hot-line service that gathers tips on telephone scams. He says that his organization has already collected more than two dozen complaints connected to Pentium Capital's phone number -- comprising three business-directory scams and one credit-card scam, but he will not elaborate on the details of an investigation.
He says telephone scams have proliferated in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver because of light sentences for fraud convictions in Canada.
In almost all cases, he says, the con artists are Canadians, and frequently they are connected to organized crime. "We have Italian organized crime, Jewish organized crime, bikers, and Jamaican organized crime," he says. "There is usually violence involved. When we take an operation down, we have to go in with tactical units, and we usually find guns."
Those operations can be lucrative. "When you look at these telemarketing scams, they may be getting anywhere from $300 to $1,000 per hit," Sargeant Elliott says. "That doesn't sound like a lot, but there are hundreds or thousands of victims, so that's a lot of money." A telephone scam busted in Montreal earlier this month had bilked American companies out of some $45-million, authorities say.
"There are simply so many rooms operating on any given day in this area, we don't have enough resources to take them all down," he says. "We're simply nibbling away."
In the meantime, he says, the best way to fight fraud is to inform employees.
At Washington University in St. Louis, the purchasing department has set up a Web site describing various fraud schemes, listing names of companies to avoid, and providing links to pages describing the latest scams.
"We try to educate our departments about these scams," says Gregory G. Mosley, the associate director of purchasing services. Instances of departments falling prey to the companies have gone down, but it is always a challenge to get the word out and keep track of orders in the decentralized environment of a university.
Now and then, he says, his office will catch a payment that is going out to a suspect company.
If a department gets tangled up with a harassing scam operation, "we'll make contact with the company and hope that we can throw our weight around," he says. "Sometimes a few cease-and-desist letters will do it."
"They are certainly pushy," he says of the companies he has dealt with. "That's how they often get people to give in."
God I really hate this kind of crap.
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Date: 2005-02-21 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-21 11:48 pm (UTC)Bullies and scam-artists piss me off so much.
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Date: 2005-02-22 12:09 am (UTC)