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Who’s Behind the ‘Web Listings’ Mail Scam?
- PaulAJ 7y agoWhen I registered a trademark I got a very similar fake invoice from a company in Serbia. They wanted £940 for their "trademark monitoring service". The only clue that this was not a real invoice was "This offer is not an invoice but a solicitation" in the fine print at the bottom. Fortunately the Trademark Office warns everyone who registers a trademark that they can expect to receive something along these lines, but of course the idea is that in a big company the "invoice" might get paid by someone in too much of a hurry to look carefully.
- floren 7y agoI think almost any transaction which results in a public record including your address could lead to this. After I bought my house, I was inundated with letters offering mortgage insurance.
- joshmn 7y agoAnd in some states in the US, the DMV will sell your information to companies who will eagerly remind you that your car's warranty has expired.
- Wistar 7y agoWA-state. When I registered a new (to me) car three years ago, the privately-owned licensing agency misspelled my name. I began to receive junk mail to my address with the misspelled name within a week or two and which continues to this day.
- JoshTriplett 7y ago> I think almost any transaction which results in a public record including your address could lead to this. Which is one reason why public records should not include any personal information, particularly including addresses or other contact/location information.
- onetimemanytime 7y agoshould've asked 39.99 euros. Many would have sent it without thinking twice: peace of mind, just in case...
- gowld 7y agoSame when you buy a house or car or anything that is public record. And thanks to adtech, now everything is public record!
- dawnerd 7y agoIf any of this junk mail includes a prepaid mailer I just send it back to them. Its not much but does cost them money. They can pay to have their trash thrown out.
- meej 7y agoTape it to a brick, for good measure.
- joncrane 7y agoCommon fallacy. The USPS will not deliver anything significantly heavier than the expected weight of the mail piece.
- dawnerd 7y agoSome might slip through the cracks. But in most cases they'd just give the receiver a postage due notice and those junk companies wouldn't pay so it get trashed anyways. Better to make sure the company gets it so they have to pay someone to open it.
- chipperyman573 7y agoHow could it slip through the cracks and still charge the company the full charge?
- dawnerd 7y agoI meant usps might miss it. It happens, sometimes they don't catch overweight items. Fun fact, there's some businesses that take advantage of this fact. I ordered two huge rolls of bubble wrap and the shipper stuck a first class label on it. I weighed the bag and it was 3lbs. All depends on if the postal employee feels like bothering with it.
- chipperyman573 7y ago
- dimensi0nal 7y agoThe previous occupant of my apartment had a .com with real WHOIS information. I got a scam invoice for a renewal at multiple times the actual cost.
- jawns 7y agoIt irritates me when people say this isn't a scam because the invoice discloses (in fine print) that it is a solicitation not a bill. The fact is, most scams operate this way. There are generally subtle signs that it's a scam if you look hard enough AND know what to look for, but they are effective because they are misleading and rely on some realities of human nature, such as the fact that many people trust that when they receive something that looks like a bill, it's actually a bill, and they will often pay it without looking it over with a fine-toothed comb. Claiming that it's not a scam, even though it's clearly deceptive, just because an astute person might be able to identify it as a scam by reading the fine print, is unfair to those who are taken in. It's like trying to pass off counterfeit bills and then claiming you weren't engaging in fraud because the money had "Not legal tender" written in small print and the store clerk would have realized that if they'd only inspected every individual bill closely enough. This scam is also not a "stupid tax." Its victims do not deserve to be defrauded simply because they failed to exercise the same caution that a more savvy person might have. It is an immoral, legally gray activity that hurts others and tends to prey on vulnerable people, like the elderly and those for whom English is not a first language.
- goatherders 7y agoKind of like when FB and others testified to congress that their data collection practices were clearly disclosed in the TOS
- jcranmer 7y agohttps://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/3001 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/3001 (specifically, (d)) says that it's a scam: > Matter otherwise legally acceptable in the mails which— is in the form of, and reasonably could be interpreted or construed as, a bill, invoice, or statement of account due; but constitutes, in fact, a solicitation for the order by the addressee of goods or services, or both; is nonmailable matter [...] unless such matter bears on its face, in conspicuous and legible type in contrast by typography, layout, or color with other printing on its face [...] the following notice: [...] (emphasis added). The law says that this wiggle room does not exist directly in the text. It's a scam, and clearly so.
- luckylion 7y agoIn Germany, if you register a company, your accountant will warn you that you'll get scam invoices. The notary that does the legal stuff will warn you. And finally the official court registry will send you a letter warning you that you'll get scam invoices (their letter arrives after the first scam invoices, though). It's ridiculous. Everybody knows it's a scam, they even give themselves official-sounding names to pretend that they are the official registry, and yet the government just folds and says "I guess we can't do anything". It's a joke.
- dmix 7y agoThis is the same reason everyone gets a hundred spam calls a year. There is zero enforcement even though most times you can deanonymize these scammers with 15min of googling or talking to them. Scambaiting has been popular on Youtube for years. They seem to be the only ones doing anything about it. The arrests last November in India shutting down the call center was a rarity.
- tialaramex 7y agoIt's the same with pyramid schemes. Essentially all "Direct Marketing" businesses of any significant size are just a pyramid scheme of course, but governments are reluctant to try to jail people for it, since of course these people will have all the resources of their bogus "company" to throw at the court case. So they mostly limit themselves to trying to force these companies to "explain" their "Direct Marketing" company in a way that should help more victims to spot the scam before they lose their life savings. For example they might oblige the company to tell (albeit not necessarily very obviously in headline fonts) its new "independent business owners" that only 0.01% of such "independent business owners" make any money at all in a typical year's operations. That's the sort of sobering statistic that might persuade some other gullible people to reconsider. Or not. But just going in and shutting down the business - they're not keen. After all, the same victims will likely just sign up for another and perhaps even more predatory pyramid scheme. My favourite scheme (I used to research these) had a setup where they sold basically mediocre fruit juice as a health product, and it's a pyramid scheme but then the extra genius is that the product sold through this pyramid scheme is itself bogus. So even the underlying business, ignoring the pyramid structure, is crooked anyway. The corporations were set up such that if the pyramid scheme is busted it has no money, all the "real" profit went to the notionally separate company making mediocre fruit juice. They can claim ignorance of the pyramid scheme and of the bogus health claims, everything, and they keep all the money. Brilliant.
- hogFeast 7y agoThe guy mentioned has quite a significant online profile. He runs a startup that just raised quite a bit of money and I heard about him before I clicked the post. Not going to link (tbh, anyone can probably find this guy/his picture/videos online) in case this turns out to be a case of mistaken identity (the guy who raised the money is 100% the guy Krebs is talking about...maybe Krebs is wrong though) but...if this is true...it seems that some well-regarded people really didn't do their due diligence.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 7y ago> it seems that some well-regarded people really didn't do their due diligence. That is not rare at all. Lots of scammers try to milk investors. Usually unsuccessfully but sometimes they score, and sometimes they score big too.
- hogFeast 7y agoYep, one of the investors is a guy who has made $25m from investing in similar companies (and ran his own). Scamming institutional investors isn't unusual. I know the lead investor on the deal is one of these PE/VC bubble firms that sprung up in the last ten years. But there are people involved who are definitely not stupid. Also, the company is most certainly not a scam. Again, I heard about them years ago, and they have a legitimate business selling to consumers (i.e. it is fairly straightforward to check if the business exists).
- lonelappde 7y agoOf course they did due diligence. They found someone with profitable ideas and execution. This very site is funded by an investor that brags about explicitly filtering for founders that break the rules they can get away with ("being naughty" and "hacking the system"), and has made millions of dollars from startups like AirBnB that are built and marketed on that premise.
- wildduck 7y agoHas anyone try to go the site. it gets redirected to: http://107.170.104.233/online/ http://107.170.104.233/online/ Says secure payment on a NON-SSL site. Sounds pretty shady.
- gowld 7y agoCan you name a legit site for the general public that doesn't even have a domain name?
- tialaramex 7y ago1.1.1.1 does have a domain name (and of course is operated by Cloudflare) but it doesn't redirect you or anything, it's totally happy to advertise itself as https://1.1.1.1/ https://1.1.1.1/ which seems more memorable than most possible names.
- lonelappde 7y agoYes the DNS companies are an exception because the number is meaningful to humans.
- waltbosz 7y agoI remember receiving letters in the mail to remind me it was time to renew my domain name. They were sent around the time my domain was set to expire, except they were sent from a different registrar. It was written in a way that made it easy to miss the fact that the sender of the letter was not my registrar. IIRC, the letter contained scary language like "you must renew to keep your domain name!". I only noticed the fine print that said it was a solicitation for business because I was curious why this other registrar was contacting me.
- thrownaway954 7y agoso what's happen to these people? it sucks that you can report them hand over fist and nothing happens to them and they continue to operate and scam people.
- ficklepickle 7y agoRead the comments. This appears to be him: https://www.bellaandduke.com/our-story/ https://www.bellaandduke.com/our-story/ His latest scam involves a terrible DIY website hocking "healthy" dog food
- chuckgreenman 7y agoOh geeze, he claims that regular dog food gives dogs cancer in one of those promo videos. Yikes.
- throwaway13337 7y agoThis kind of salesmanship sliding into fraud is getting more common in the US. ADT (the big home security company) had someone come to my house that I recently bought. He insisted he was not a salesman. He pretended that the house had previously been using their services (but didn't out right say it). He asked if the escrow office informed me, and said that their system was 'already set up'. Of course, it wasn't. It was a ploy but a confusing, sinister one. It's troubling that such a large company can get away with this legally. It's also not surprising that the merchants of fear (selling security) are employing such tactics.
- nradov 7y agoLarge businesses which rely on direct sales to consumers frequently set sales quotas so high that salespeople are effectively forced to cheat or even break the law. When caught, the executives have plausible deniability because they never explicitly ordered anyone to act unethically. It was all just implied.
- gowld 7y ago> This kind of salesmanship sliding into fraud is getting more common in the US No, but you are getting older and wiser.
- tialaramex 7y agoThe UK has this situation where Tories insisted on privatising the utilities even though they are a natural monopoly. So the actual delivery (of gas or electricity) was given to a company to do but then "supply" to customers is on paper something customers can switch, even though obviously the actual gas or electricity delivered to your home can't be switched because that would be horribly impractical. The idea was people can choose a better "supplier" - maybe it's a famous brand or they liked the TV advert or it just offers better prices. These days a lot of them offer "100% Green electricity". You're getting the same electricity as ever, but they've got a spreadsheet which shows they bought the requisite amount of "credits" for solar or wind or whatever not coal. Not quite pointless, but maybe about the same practical impact as signing a petition. Anyway of course it turns out consumers don't like change (this is the Conservative party, you'd think they might know a thing or two about that) and so most people stuck with the "incumbent" they were assigned based on where they lived even if it had worse customer service and higher prices. But just keeping 80+% of the market wasn't enough. Incumbent suppliers wanted 100% of "their" market, so for way too long (until businesses actually got fined real money for this after being caught on camera too often) they'd do stuff like a sales guy is given a badge which says "District manager" or something, not "Sales" - and dressed up like an actual maintenance guy and he shows up at homes that have switched to a different supplier. He's all apologetic, "Sorry to bother you," but he just needs you to sign some paperwork because of a "problem". Maybe he looks at a meter, pretends to examine the cables or pipework... He doesn't mention that he's a sales person and the "problem" is that you're paying less money to somebody else for the same product. You sign, "All done, you won't have any more problems" and you only find out when the bill arrives from an unfamiliar supplier what sort of "problem" it was you were having. Of course if you spent a few minutes reading the paperwork it says what you're signing, so it won't fool the average HN reader, but "Technically not scamming most smart people" isn't the standard we ought to be setting for anybody, much less essential utilities.
- gnicholas 7y agoI was shocked that our public schools do business with a company that does something similar, which is also illegal: Kids draw a picture in art class, and come home a week later with a magnet that has been printed with their drawing. They also have an invoice saying you can order these other things (mugs, shirts, etc), and we've included a sample magnet so you can see what the printing looks like. But the magnet isn't free — if you want to keep it, you're supposed to pay 6 bucks, or you can return it to the basket where the order slips go. Now of course no kid wants their artwork to be sent back and destroyed, so they want you to keep it. And since that forces you to fill out the order form, perhaps you'll order something else while you're at it. Of course, the prices are terrible compared to vistaprint/costco/etc. And since you have the original art (that your kid made), if you want to have a shirt printed up, you can do so for half the price elsewhere. This practice is totally illegal (where I am, in California). You can't send someone a thing and then charge them if they don't send it back. I was surprised and disappointed that our public school would partner with a company that literally breaks the law, to the detriment of students and their families.
- idoh 7y agoSame thing happened to me, but it was photos. I just kept the photos, threw away the order form. If they give random things to kids then the parent is not on the hook to make sure those things are returned.
- gowld 7y agoIt's not illegal to ask for payment, they just can't legally force you to pay or return it. > I was surprised and disappointed that our public school would partner with a company The company gave money to an admin or the district.
- cardiffspaceman 7y agoI share your shock. The copyright on the drawing is owned by the child no? Also moral rights.
- zaphirplane 7y agoWhat’s the enforcement mechanism they use to make you pay? Is it the honesty of the parent ?
- feross 7y agoDuplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22668610 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22668610
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoSo did Krebs report all this? I'm surprised to see so much talk congratulating Krebs on his skilful fact-finding, and seemingly no mention of informing the authorities.
- lonelappde 7y agoWhat was the crime under the law?
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoThe offence of deliberately scamming people, of course. This comment [0] points out that it's likely against the law in the USA. (I think the relevant law is at the federal level.) It seems likely that Scotland's laws are similar. I get the sense that a lot of people think it's obvious the law can do nothing, so there's no point even reporting the guy. I don't see the sense in this. I imagine scammers benefit greatly from this kind of thinking. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22677118