33 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981Copyright © 2015 E. William Horne. All Rights Reserved.The Telecom Digest for May 29, 2015
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| I deeply believe in equal justice for all Americans, whatever their station or former station. The law, whether human or divine, is no respecter of persons; but the law is a respecter of reality. |
| Gerald Ford |
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| Date: Thu, 28 May 2015 19:27:42 -0400 From: danny burstein <dannyb@panix.com> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: feds indict six in "text msg scam" Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1505281922560.23622@panix5.panix.com> [DOJ press release] Six Defendants Charged In Manhattan Federal Court In Multimillion-Dollar Text Messaging Consumer Fraud Scheme Defendants Fraudulently Charged Hundreds of Thousands of Mobile Phone Customers More Than $50 Million for Text Messaging Services Without Their Knowledge or Consent ... with participating in a scheme to charge mobile phone customers tens of millions of dollars in monthly fees for unsolicited, recurring text messages about topics such as horoscopes, celebrity gossip, and trivia facts, without the customers' knowledge or consent - a practice the defendants referred to as "auto-subscribing." ... engaged in a multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud consumers by placing unauthorized charges for premium text messaging services on consumers' cellular phone bills ... The consumers who received the unsolicited text messages typically ignored or deleted the messages, often believing them to be spam. Regardless, the consumers were billed for the receipt of the messages, at a rate of $9.99 per month, through charges that typically appeared on the consumers' cellular telephone bills in an abbreviated and confusing form ... Even then, consumers' attempts to dispute the charges and obtain refunds from the Texting Company or from the Texting Company's Affiliates were often unsuccessful ==== http://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/six-defendants-charged-manhattan-federal-court-multimillion-dollar-text-messaging - curiously (or not) nothing in the press release about the billing practices of the cellular companies themselves or whether they helped, or hindered... _____________________________________________________ Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key dannyb@panix.com [to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded] |
| Date: Thu, 28 May 2015 15:47:31 +1000 From: David Clayton <dc33box-usenet2@NOSPAM.yahoo.com.au> To: telecomdigestsubmissions.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org. Subject: Re: A Tech Boom Aimed at the Few, Instead of the World Message-ID: <pan.2015.05.28.05.47.28.406301@NOSPAM.yahoo.com.au> On Mon, 25 May 2015 18:49:36 -0400, Monty Solomon wrote: > The industry once thought big, but today's wave of start-ups is > characterized by a rise in services aimed at the wealthy and the young. > > With a few taps on a phone, for a fee, today's hottest start-ups will help > people on the lowest rungs of the 1 percent live like their betters in the > 0.1 percent. These services give the modestly wealthy a chance to enjoy > the cooks, cleaners, drivers, personal assistants and all the other lavish > appointments that have defined extravagant wealth. As one critic tweeted, > San Francisco's tech industry "is focused on solving one problem: What is > my mother no longer doing for me?" Is the ultimate app going to be something that can live your entire life for you at the touch of a screen - for a price, of course? Perhaps if we weren't so "busy" interacting with all of our tech-toys all day and night we might have the time to do what people had managed to do for millennia? -- Regards, David. David Clayton Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Knowledge is a measure of how many answers you have, intelligence is a measure of how many questions you have. ***** Moderator's Note ***** Aha! At last, someone else who sees the problem! Bill Horne Moderator |
TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly to telecom- munications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to Usenet, where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'.
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