Those of you old enough, remember when the telemarketing industry made answering your landline more complicated than it was worth? Then, after more than a decade of that plague, remember when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) started enforcing the Do Not Call registration in 2003, and it ended the onslaught? And do you remember 19 years later, thanks to robotics technology, the plague was now so bad that the Israelites had to ask, “Can we get the locusts back?” The FTC has finally perfected its legal apparatus to address an issue close to our target: the expansion of automobiles. insurance.
The FTC has filed a complaint in United States District Court for the Southern District against American Vehicle Protection Corp (AVP), with headquarters in Pompano Beach, with defendants and related businesses including Tony Allen Gonzalez, Charles Gonzalez and Daniel Kole.
Government agencies put out a note last year explain that if “Susie” from “Vehicle Service” calls, hang up because such calls are illegal and “probably fraudulent”, then report the call to the No list Call. That did not give the desired effect, so the FTC extended this law of length and fiber. The commission accused AVP of “calling hundreds of thousands of consumers across the country,” many on the Do Not Call list, to sell extended warranty costs between $2,800 and $3,400, earning more than $6 million over the past four years. The lawsuit also alleges the defendants misrepresented who they were, misrepresented the scope of the warranty offered, and despite offering 30-day money-backs if customers were unsatisfied, offered no refunds. money back. The agency wants to prohibit defendants from continuing to make calls to people in the registry, from remotely processing checks to payments, and it wants financial settlement for consumers.
Mitchell Roth, the defendants’ attorney, said that after the AVP learned of the problems with the FTC, the principals shut down to reshuffle operations and said the FTC could not sue for financial compensation to consumers. use. Roth said CNN“The AVP is committed to all laws and finds it regrettable that the committee has chosen to pursue its case despite the changes it has made and despite the limitations Congress has imposed on its right to term as described in AVP’s action.”
Not that this will prevent flooding. Transactional Network Services puts the number of automated calls through the first half of 2020 at 22.8 billion, while the YouMail Automated Calls Index puts the number of automated calls in September 2020 at 126.9 million calls per day. Among YouMail’s Top 50 Robots in the United States in December 2021, about half are large corporations such as Capital One, Wells Fargo, Ally Financial, Chrysler Finance, AT&T, Comcast and Spectrum. And the scams go deeper than trying to get someone to buy a product or donate; One piece in The Wall Street Journal explained how scammers can make money just by having a phone number that matches the caller ID name in the database and no one has to answer the phone for the scammer to profit. Even so, we applaud the FTC for taking this step.
