Marketers of “FREE” iPad settles with FTC

i keep getting emails from amazon that it very difficult to close them out. they say congrats you won something and then direct you to surveys. just like publishing clearing house...it was a chore to to unsubscribe from them. i am on a few job search websites and some of them, if you click on say you agree to texts messages and phone calls from telemarketers. i didnt because they are not job related

It is not on hold. It was suspended which means they got off with no payment required. Sucks being a victim doesn't it?

These are not from Amazon. I am a prime member and they had me forward the one I got to them so they could go after the scammers. Amazon is a good business.

Second time i gotva call from this number, both came in on the caller I D as not Assigned.....never leftvany messages just rang ang hung up...i automatically block these numbers now.....its getting to becold hat now with their stupid scams........

Do not answer 855 allows the caller to have you pay for the call, look up 855

The scumbags that could not pay should all be chained to the bumper of a pickup truck with a full tank of gas and driven at an idle across the state of Texas until only the chains are bouncing behind the truck.

The FTC is truly the epitome of government bureaucracy. Idiots and incompetent.

I have firsthand experience from one of my prior employers to tell you that these changes absolutely are deterrents to advertisers from doing what was done here. I also think you're missing the main crux of the article..I'll explain.

I worked for a company that did affiliate marketing on the internet with banner ads, spam email, etc. - we were basically doing the exact same thing as the story above but we were just advertising on websites and through email instead of text. We were sued in 2003 by claiming we'd violated the DMCA, with the specific issue revolving around the usage of the word 'free' in our ads just like these people were doing with these text messages.

The end result is basically that an ad cannot say something is FREE without explicitly detailing the requirements to get that something right on the advertisement itself and not buried deep in some [***] terms page, and if you don't, you're basically required to actually give people that thing for free or you can refuse and

It was every dollar they'd made from their scam text message ads - that is literally every dollar that company ever made...I don't know how you classify "We are fining you every dollar your company has ever made" as a deal, while also barring the people participating from operating that business any longer or anything close to it. They got their [***] handed to them, as they should.

***Accidentally hit submit on my previous post and it won't let me edit. Here's the full post****

I have firsthand experience from one of my prior employers to tell you that these changes absolutely are deterrents to advertisers from doing what was done here. I also think you're missing the main crux of the article..I'll explain.

Here's a link to an L.A. Times article about the company I worked for:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2008- ... ck18-story.html

The part about the credit card numbers is totally incorrect, though - All we did was advertise legitimate companies products who then paid us when a person bought something from them after going to their site through our ads; we had nothing to even sell so we had no credit card numbers to store nor any reason to do so. We used 'free' on EVERYTHING and we were making a lot of money as people would click our ads and then buy products from other companies who paid us a fee for driving that person to their website who ended up making that purchase (well, our bosses who started the company, which then got bought out by ValueClick, made an absolute boat load of money - but it was definitely a consistent money maker for many years).

I worked for a company that did affiliate marketing on the internet with banner ads, spam email, etc. - we were basically doing the exact same thing as the story above but we were just advertising on websites and through email instead of text. We were sued in 2003 by claiming we'd violated the DMCA, with the specific issue revolving around the usage of the word 'free' in our ads just like these people were doing with these text messages.

The end result is basically that an ad cannot say something is FREE without explicitly detailing the requirements to get that something right on the advertisement itself and not buried deep inside paragraphs of legal terms, and if you don't, you're basically required to actually give people that thing for free or you can refuse and open yourself up for an indefensible lawsuit where the judge will likely shut you down as well, as was done here. The only reason these people here were making any money at all was due to their use of the word FREE, and they appear to not even have made much on it even so. Without that single deceptive word, this whole business model falls apart because people just aren't going to participate - the conversion rates will be insanely low and it just will not be worth it for a company to try. This is what I meant when I said I thought you were missing the main issue at hand here - this crap only works through deception, and using deception makes you the easiest of easy targets for anyone to sue your company for everything it's worth.

I am sure these criminals will be back at work on some scam quite soon.  There should be some way to collect the monetary fine as there is for others... Garnishment etc.  in this technological age I don't believe they can be prevented from creating another deceptive enterprise, and they will again take other people's money .

what sharp teeth.   the monetary penalty was waived, after expenses to others who were spamming, and noone got any jail time.

So in other words you make a living by filling up mailboxes and cell phones with messages, that people don't want, wasting their time on the chance that a very few of them may want to buy a product.   It takes good people to help bad people do things they shouldn't

Agreed in full.  We all hate big government, until we need it.  [Sigh.]

The FTC brought the case before a federal judge. That is sufficient 'sharp teeth' to get the job done. As for 'big government', a vote for anyone in the top two political bodies is a vote for 'bigger government'.