Smartphone Reseller Cheated Customers Out of Millions, Feds Say (arstechnica.com) 66
An anonymous reader writes:The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has sued a Nevada-based company called Laptop & Desktop Repair LLC (LDR) for allegedly bilking thousands of customers out of millions of dollars in promised funds for the resale of their smartphones. LDR operated dozens of websites that promised customers high returns for their smartphones and tablets using an instant quote generator. The customers, believing that this website would pay the highest price for their used gadget, sent their phones to LDR. Once LDR received the gadget, it would offer the customer a "revised quote" that was often only three to ten percent of the original quoted price. Customers only had three to five days to dispute the revised quote, the FTC's complaint claimed. The FTC further alleged that when customers would call LDR to request their smartphones back, the company would put them on hold for extraordinarily long periods of time, the call would be dropped, and an LDR employee would say the phone had already been processed. If the customer persisted in threatening to report LDR's actions, company representatives would offer slightly higher resale prices.
Nothing New Here (Score:1)
This type of thing happens all the time with different products -
IE: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tigerdirect-and-compusa-q38a-pc-buy-back-program/
Re: Nothing New Here (Score:5, Insightful)
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People should definitely know better, but stop blaming the victims...
Let's start with your first statement, which is the relevant one; People should definitely know better. Another way of putting that for this particular scam is if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
In this case, I see far more value in blaming the victims in order to educate this kind of stupidity and ignorance out of our society. I'm sure we can run some statistics against the infamous Wall O' Sheep at DEFCON to determine the effectiveness of embarrassing the shit out of people vs. enacting mo
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Weak people should be beaten because they're too weak to fight back, those with bad vision should die if they don't see a car coming, ... what utter bullshit.
The reason why there are laws is because unlike you, the society recognizes that everybody has strength and weaknesses and that weaknesses should not be a reason for being abused.
You seem to be smart enough to not fall into this trap, but you're an utter idiot when it comes to living with others. No one is perfect.
You seem like the kind of person t
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Weak people should be beaten because they're too weak to fight back, those with bad vision should die if they don't see a car coming, ... what utter bullshit.
The reason why there are laws is because unlike you, the society recognizes that everybody has strength and weaknesses and that weaknesses should not be a reason for being abused.
You seem to be smart enough to not fall into this trap, but you're an utter idiot when it comes to living with others. No one is perfect.
You seem like the kind of person that advocates for remembering 12 characters random passwords and think anyone who is not capable of that should deserve to be hacked. That gives you a feeling of superiority and must surely feel good, because it tends to rank human on a scale that favors you, and hides all of your weaknesses that others may not have.
I think the society should promote nice, helpful, friendly (though maybe naive) persons against those who take advantage of others weaknesses for their personal gain and ego (just like you).
There have always been two teachers in life; wisdom and experience.
As far as your "bullshit" examples go, realize that we promote self-defense for the weak, and promote corrective lenses for those with bad vision. The burden to educate and improve our society does not solely lie with lawmakers to address weaknesses.
I also believe in root cause analysis to prevent or deter future criminal activity. Yes, we should have laws that deter criminal activity, but in order to eliminate the ability for the crime to
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Re:Nothing New Here (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.craigslist.org/abo... [craigslist.org]
At least they did not paw with a fake cashiers check...
Russian owned (Score:1)
LDR, owned by Vadim Olegovich Kruchinin.
Sad, this guy is giving Russians a bad name.
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To be fair... it looks like a couple of Russians (his parents) gave him a pretty bad name first..
Yet another civil case.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Take it easy, Obama.
Baby Bush oversaw a hell of a lot more scaling back of due process than Obama. But I bet you don't see it that way.
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Take it easy, Obama.
Baby Bush oversaw a hell of a lot more scaling back of due process than Obama. But I bet you don't see it that way.
So it is OK to rob you if you have been robbed before?
Re:Yet another civil case.. (Score:4, Informative)
Take it easy, Obama.
Baby Bush oversaw a hell of a lot more scaling back of due process than Obama. But I bet you don't see it that way.
So it is OK to rob you if you have been robbed before?
No, but if I unilaterally call you an "enemy combatant", I can do whatever the fuck I want to you.
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that's because there will always be idiots who will do business with sketchy companies that promise big money and no one had ever heard of that company before
Re:Yet another civil case.. (Score:4, Funny)
No, see, this is just smart business. I think that the CEO of this company should run for office...
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Like the bumper sticker says: "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one."
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At the very least this is fraud. If an individual does this they will be charged with fraud and looking at 10 years minimum. Conmen who get caught *do* go to jail... but concompanies - they just get a lawsuit and a fine.
Limited liability should be scrapped as simple matter of justice - it flat out makes a joke out of the idea of equal-before-the-law.
Sounds like "mail us your gold" (Score:3)
Ideal targets (Score:4, Insightful)
They did pick a uniquely gullible demographic- People who spend hundreds of dollars on a new phone when they have a working smartphone. These people have proven through their actions that they are unable to make good financial decisions. Good business plan. Learning from the best- Jobs,Cook et al
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My pristine device was suddenly not so pristine and the valuation dropped to a fraction of the amount. The device I got back was covered in scratches; I assume they accidentally mixed it up and someone else made out on the deal, but I have refused to deal with such services for as long as I can as a result.
You did not record the serial number? This would be very easy to prove fraud and they would have to pay you the original quote.
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Not all parts have serial numbers. I've encountered places which will happily strip the screen and back off a pristine device, replace it with something heavily scuffed, and if the customer claims it that isn't their phone, the merchant just shows the IMEI number and tells the customer to scram or deal with the cops. I've seen this in many places, be it jewelry shops that change the stone out, and so on. This is also a classic eBay scam as well. Send a customer a perfectly good 128 GB iPhone, they dispu
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Just because you can afford it doesnt mean you should buy it if you dont need it. Thats just useless consumption and creating more ewaste and pollution. Just because a phone does not pollute doesnt mean the factory building it doesnt. It would be different if your phone is 3+ years old and updates are not coming and latest software is not working on it. But in that case the phone would anyway not have resale value. These places are based on the premise that the phone is good enough to use and can be resold
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So no one ever upgrades phones because they want a different screen size, or more storage, faster processor, or a feature their currently functional phone doesn't have? It's ALWAYS just about having the latest as sign of status, right? Never a legitimate need to upgrade.
With Appologies to Joe... (Score:2)
Solution going forward (Score:3)
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Does this sort of lock prevent re-flashing or factory reset? I'm genuinely interested!
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Even non-scum phone trade-in companies won't be giving you a dime if you send them an iCloud-locked iPhone or FRP-locked Android. How do they get any guarantee you'll actually (or are actually able to/authorized to) unlock the phone after you get paid?
This would be ripe for abuse, since a criminal could just sell the company stolen phones all day long, get the money, then bail. Any company that wants to stay in business could never operate this way, because the chances of the phones ever being unlocked is s
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Federal thresholds for action. (Score:3)
From TFA:
"The FTC said it has received more than 4,000 complaints from customers about LDR websites since 2011."
For organizations like the FTC and BBB, what exactly is the damn threshold for these kinds of regulatory agencies to stop sitting on their asses taking complaints and instead take action?
No wonder Wells Fargo was able to get away with their damn scam for years. Why even bother with anti-corruption policies in business when it's become the fucking status quo at the Federal level.
Apparently 4,000 for FTC. For BBB, 1 (Score:1)
For the FTC, which is a government agency, apparently the threshold is about 4,000.
The BBB is not a regulatory agency, it's private-sector group whose members are businesses. For the BBB, the threshold is one - they'll take action from the first complaint. The BBB does three things with complaints. 1) ask the company to resolve the complaint, 2) post the result on their web
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Yep, BETTER Business Bureau, not law enforcement (Score:2)
That's correct. A BBB, as the name suggests, works to improve business in their area. They are not law enforcement. Criminals are not their area, better businesses areb
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BBB is a rating agency. I don't think they have any actual teeth. As for FTC, sure they should've seen a pattern of abuse a lot sooner and taken 'some' action to relegate it. Even a stiff warning can be enough to revise some companys' policies, but certainly a cash penalty is best.
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You do know that most social media sites since the paleolithic era manage reputation differently than displaying your elite 5-digit UID on every post?
Bear in mind that almost all blackmail is reputational blackmail (as someone running exclusively on ZFS with automatic snapshots, I can still claim this to be true).
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Weak Sauce (Score:2)
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