mail, causing Internet users to rack up international phone charges. The scammers tricked consumers into placing the costly calls by sending e-mail saying their orders for pornographic material was being processed and the charges would be added to their credit cards.
The e-mail message stated the consumers were being billed for $250 to $899 and provided a '767' telephone number of a contact representative, for any questions regarding their orders. When the unwitting recipient of the notification called the number they were calling Roseau, Dominica, which the FTC says doesn't require its telephone numbers to be preceded by a country code.
So, as consumers called the international number to cancel the bogus orders they accumulated long distance charges. And the scammers raked in money from U.S. telephone carriers for "pay-per-call" charges.
The FTC has obtained a court order from the U.S. District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. It prohibits the many U.S. telephone carriers involved in the case from remitting funds to owners of the '767' number.
"These defendants were using telephone billing and collection systems to get money--we have stopped that money right in the pipeline," said FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection's Eileen Harrington.
In addition to preventing the scammers from receiving money from telephone carriers, the FTC is trying to recover the consumers phone call costs. First, though, they have to identify the scammers.
"Some of these crooks think they can take advantage of the anonymity of the Net, but we are now using court-backed discovery to learn who these people are--and we will," said Harrington.
