I received about 20 of these scam letters after buying a house. I kept all of them in a folder for my records. One thing that I noticed is that all these scam letters included a no-postage-required, Business Reply Mail envelope. I guess they make so much money off these scams that they can pay the return postage.
I returned all of these envelopes filled to the max with random pieces of junk paper. BUT, I made sure that my name and address (or zip code) did not appear in anything that I sent back. If I understand the USPS rates correctly (https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm), each returned mail costs them $1.38. Maybe if enough people sent these envelopes back (with junk), the low hit rate compared to cost of the returned letters would make this business unprofitable.
I did something similar with the Peter Popoff scam letters...I would either fill it with old dead batteries, or just go outside and fill it to the brim with dirt. Nothing really identifiable with that, and it was a was a relatively easy way to cost him money.
> One thing that I noticed is that all these scam letters included a no-postage-required, Business Reply Mail envelope. I guess they make so much money off these scams that they can pay the return postage.
For business reply envelopes (BRE) you only pay postage for the envelopes that are sent back and not the ones that are printed. If you're sending back something, chances are you're sending them an $89 check so it more than covers for postage cost. The envelope cost is marginal.
Oh, there are a so many of these schemes running in Germany around company registration that notaries are now accounting for them in the incorporation paper work. Notaries are protecting themselves having a written confirmation their clients have been made aware of the problem.
The scam is done by crawling the public announcements of new registered companies. Then the scammer, also a proper company, sends out an "offer" for registration in their database. Also, be aware refusal to pay will result in deletion of the record and people won't be able to find the company in that particular database. Fees are payable within two weeks, wire transfer and bank details are included, and run between 400 and 800 Euro (at least the ones I got). One number I heard was that roughly a third of new companies pay at least one of these scammers. Crazy, right? Also legal because it is an "offer" for a "service"...
Counter point. If this(free postage) is an easy and good proxy for detecting this type of scam. By doing this they might stop(doing free postage) . And then you and others lose their easy no effor detection?
> Senders of official-looking direct mail get around these restrictions by including language — often in fine print — declaring that the correspondence is not in fact official.
Ban fine print. Honestly. Anything that declares the correspondence is not official has to be in the same point size as the body of the text, separated out into it's own paragraph in plain no uncertain terms that the majority of adults could understand.
I worked at a title company and owned the escrow and documentation preparation software. At the time they used line printers to print on carbon copy forms. Each page was differently colored so the "original" was always the white top copy. Getting a new copy of the paperwork was of course expensive and only the original was accepted for certain purposes.
We had a very interesting conversation with the doc prep department when I moved everything to using high speed laserjet printers. "Which one is the original, now?" The end result was someone buying a large rubber stamp that read "Original." :-)
Or the courts should start taking graphic design into account: if there is any ambiguity, the large & legible print should be enforced and the difficult to read fine print disregarded.
I just throw out any mailing that pretends to be official but isn't (it's not hard to distinguish - official ones tell you who's sending it and why, scam ones don't), regardless of what it says. If they feel the need to trick me even before our business has started, there's no chance they intend to be honest later, so why would I want to do any business with overt crooks?
Americans simply have no idea how (relatively) straightforward and simple their model of property purchase, sale and ownership are.
In Ireland you get this letter in 8 point font from a company with no phone number demanding 1000 euro for ground rent and threatening you with legal action....AND it turns out to be completely legitimate because The Earl of Blah Blah and the Archbishop of such and such owned your ground rent until 1978 (when the Irish government finally ended the feudal system) and they sold it to some shifty operator who now collects and you're in arrears on your 11 euro per year since then and they've added admin charges...oh and you can buy out your ground rent, but you have to fill out a 12 page form and make sure you don't pay them unless you've confirmed they're the sole rights holder and if you forget to pay and the lease expires (you know because the solicitor forgot to mention the 275 year lease was expiring or something) then they own your house OR you have to pay them 1/8th of the value to claw back the house you bought perfectly legitimately.
Ugh. This reminds me of the USPS address change scam. Just type "change address" into Google and see how many Ad results for this are thrown in top of your search results. They are all semi official looking, and charge you. I'm ashamed to admit I fell victim to one of these after a very long day of moving and a few beers years back. The USPS offers this for $1(not free, thanks ebg13)! I blame myself, but do wonder why Google allows and even promotes these sites...
Oh, it doesn't only cost you $1. It also costs you at minimum a years worth of free spam mail from various "You're moving! Here's a bunch of discount coupons for things you don't need" that USPS sells your new address to.
I hold a belief in small government, but the spam mail I've been receiving since building a house cries loudly for regulation.
They make this stuff look so official. They use IRS fonts. They print it on pink paper. They write "final notice" when that's meaningless. They have your PII from the public records and make it look like it's from your mortgage group.
That kind of business should be treated as fraud. Who knows how many elderly or otherwise have lost tons of money from these garbage "companies." They should be ashamed.
Regulation exists to protect people, property, the environment, or national interests. It largely comes from a reaction to harms.
That’s not to say things evolve and regulation should keep up (or that it’s ineffective for its goals), but I don’t understand why there’s such a fervent backlash against it, particularly from the right. It largely feels fueled by those who wish to profit from its undermining, and one particular party has let it be known they’re open for business in that respect.
Did these concerns exist in say, the 1960s? 1910s?
Some of this really is pretty wild. I got junk mail within a few weeks of closing that was made to look like fake late/missed payment notices and foreclosure warnings and insurance mistakes and all sorts of horrible lies. I am curious if they maintain the quality of the illusion further into the scam but not curious enough to find out.
I fell for a similar scam recently. I needed a copy of a birth certificate and my county's website was a mess and required showing up in person at the county office. I found a site like this that promised to make the process smoother and paid something like $50 for it and all they did was fill out the forms and mail it to me so that I could go stand in line at the county office.
For me the frustration is often the opposite. I show up to places in person because I'd rather talk to human beings and fill out paper forms than use their shitty website. Yet more and more often once I show up I'm told to use one of their computers to access their website. I could have done that from home!
Wow, what happens if you moved all the way across the country and needed your birth certificate? Such as for the DMV in the new state you are declaring domicile in.
Then with the new real ID thing I've heard some elder people had to rebuy their birth certificates because the DMV quit accepting the older ones.
Another version of the grift is to scrape lists of newly registered businesses and send out an official looking letter charging $80 to send a laminated poster of the kind that some states mandate be posted, e.g. about workers' comp.
Except that these materials can typically be printed out for free, and the letter makes every effort to appear to be a mandatory bill coming from a government agency.
Problem is easy to fix without explicitly outlawing the practices. If business is selling government records, they need to disclose the actual cost in a defined format on a separate insert. Violations are similar to canned spam law and have a statutory damages of $750 per violation.
There's a similar scam in europe with trademark registrations, funnily enough there are more than one operator trying this so you get 3 or 4 of invoices to register your trademark after you've registered your trademark.
Another similar scam in France when you register a company - you’ll get a half dozen official looking letters asking for a payment of hundreds of euros for a stamp and inclusion in their registry of businesses. Usually has a deadline of within 31 days of registration of the business, and a note that looks official that should be kept for the accountant. All rubbish, of course, and reliant on people who are unaware of what is actually required to register a business paying every damn bill that arrives to be sure to be on the right side of the law.
Something similar happens if you own a domain name. They'll send you an "invoice" for your domain by email or physical post hoping that someone who doesn't know too much about IT or just blindly pays invoices to fall for it. If you read the fine print it actually says that it's not an invoice but an offer to transfer to their registrar or something.
This is common not just in SoCal, but across the US, with property deeds, mortgage insurance, lots of shady businesses preying on the ignorance of property owners when public record transactions are updated.
A simple fix would be to dictate, through legislation, that you can't provide a government service such as a copy of your deed at a cost substantially above the cost the government is providing it at.
Can confirm, this has been going on for at least 15 years, so enough people must fall for it. Which is kind of remarkable, given as you say, you tend to receive 3-4 of these demands at once.
They are quite good at looking "official" though, and always have company names that you'd think private companies wouldn't even be permitted to use.
Given how long this has been going on, and given the EU's somewhat notorious legislative machine, it's also quite ridiculous that these scams haven't been outlawed yet.
I just got one of these this week! Only $3,000 to register the trademark "internationally", but they try their best to make it seem like it's part of the registration process you've already undertaken and you simply need to sign & submit to move forward.
I got a bunch of these "trademark protection" bills after registering a trademark this year. Very official-looking. First one almost had me fooled, but then I caught onto it.
This reminds me of how San Mateo county uses a third-party petdata.com for licensing dogs.
I made a faux-website complaining about how easy it would be to create an official looking scam website, particularly how the entire county uses .org domain names.
I receive stuff like this all the time because one of my cars will be out of the manufacturer's warranty soon. They masquerade as if they're form the OEM and offering to sell me additional coverage. Even though this has nothing to do with government services they still manage to make them seem "official" and alarming if you don't take any action ("You could be liable for thousands of dollars of damages!").
I'm actually more pissed at the OEM for giving these companies my information.
> The solution, I’ll say again, is a law that prohibits nonofficial communications from appearing to be official — with hefty fines for crossing the line.
Jail time. Fines means that the law is simply another part of the business's cost calculations. If the fine is low enough, and it often is, then it can still be "good business" to knowingly break the law, pay the fine, and still pull a profit.
Putting actual law-breaking humans in jail changes the cost-benefit analysis dramatically.
Hotels (when you're booking, are you SURE you're booking with
the actual hotel?) They may be collecting money to simply reserve the room under your name, but not pay for it - even if they just charged you the same amount. A $119 charge to call the hotel and put in your name.
Health Insurance (When you enter your phone number/email/name there are companies that simply collect money by re-sending your contact info to about 100 sub-scam companies. You may end up with insurance but through the worst types of people that have resold and resold. Oh and don't forget you'll be on some of the WORST robocalling services.
Pretty much all CC fraud "watch" services - especially if your own credit card company signed you up. Taking out a line of credit, if it was not valid - is already something you are protected against. If you have someone to "watch" that stuff for you, it's not really protecting you further.
I understand that these scammers automatically send their letters whenever something changes about an address. Wouldn't it be a fantastic public service if someone else automatically sent those same people a letter warning them of this scam and directing them towards more honest services?
Surely this is just fraud, i.e. obtaining money by deception? Do they really need a new law to ban this, or do they need to enforce the existing laws better?
There are so many of these scams out there. The internet allows people to google to check if it's legit, but they'll also find a lot of online firms offering the same service at a markup, which helps convince people that the original letter was legit.
In the UK it's free to change your name, you can just write your name change on a peice of paper, get a couple of friends to sign it and you're done. I've done this, but when I tried to explain to someone else the free process they told me I was wrong, citing scam websites with semi-official names that charged for the process.
I have a few domains without private registration. I often get an email a few months before they're due to expire from a business that will renew them. It's very strongly worded about how I'm about to "lose them", lots of capital letters and lots of red text. The cost to renew is $90 or so.
I've often wondered how many people fall for it (I assume enough they keep doing it), and whether they actually renew them, or just take some money and run.
Through the years I've bought domains for hobby projects and such that ultimately I'll let expire. Usually after receiving tons of emails, such as you've described, it's followed by a "we now own your domain, pay up" threat.
I've even had firms purchase other extensions for my domain (particularly a .org, .net, or .co), then email me asking to buy it from them. I usually respond and tell them I'm selling the .com domain myself and they can purchase it directly from me for half of the price they're offering to sell me the other extensions.
The main target is small business accountants. If you're a little sloppy in your approval procedures, stuff like this, priced just below common thresholds, can slide right through.
Closely related to fake invoicing, which actually is considered criminal.
[+] [-] bxparks|6 years ago|reply
I returned all of these envelopes filled to the max with random pieces of junk paper. BUT, I made sure that my name and address (or zip code) did not appear in anything that I sent back. If I understand the USPS rates correctly (https://pe.usps.com/text/dmm300/Notice123.htm), each returned mail costs them $1.38. Maybe if enough people sent these envelopes back (with junk), the low hit rate compared to cost of the returned letters would make this business unprofitable.
[+] [-] tombert|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbsks|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CiPHPerCoder|6 years ago|reply
This is a time-honored way to piss off junk mailers.
[+] [-] dmlittle|6 years ago|reply
For business reply envelopes (BRE) you only pay postage for the envelopes that are sent back and not the ones that are printed. If you're sending back something, chances are you're sending them an $89 check so it more than covers for postage cost. The envelope cost is marginal.
[+] [-] hef19898|6 years ago|reply
The scam is done by crawling the public announcements of new registered companies. Then the scammer, also a proper company, sends out an "offer" for registration in their database. Also, be aware refusal to pay will result in deletion of the record and people won't be able to find the company in that particular database. Fees are payable within two weeks, wire transfer and bank details are included, and run between 400 and 800 Euro (at least the ones I got). One number I heard was that roughly a third of new companies pay at least one of these scammers. Crazy, right? Also legal because it is an "offer" for a "service"...
[+] [-] Namrog84|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chooseaname|6 years ago|reply
Ban fine print. Honestly. Anything that declares the correspondence is not official has to be in the same point size as the body of the text, separated out into it's own paragraph in plain no uncertain terms that the majority of adults could understand.
[+] [-] technofiend|6 years ago|reply
We had a very interesting conversation with the doc prep department when I moved everything to using high speed laserjet printers. "Which one is the original, now?" The end result was someone buying a large rubber stamp that read "Original." :-)
[+] [-] a_c_s|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kova12|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] felipelemos|6 years ago|reply
* wording
[+] [-] scandox|6 years ago|reply
In Ireland you get this letter in 8 point font from a company with no phone number demanding 1000 euro for ground rent and threatening you with legal action....AND it turns out to be completely legitimate because The Earl of Blah Blah and the Archbishop of such and such owned your ground rent until 1978 (when the Irish government finally ended the feudal system) and they sold it to some shifty operator who now collects and you're in arrears on your 11 euro per year since then and they've added admin charges...oh and you can buy out your ground rent, but you have to fill out a 12 page form and make sure you don't pay them unless you've confirmed they're the sole rights holder and if you forget to pay and the lease expires (you know because the solicitor forgot to mention the 275 year lease was expiring or something) then they own your house OR you have to pay them 1/8th of the value to claw back the house you bought perfectly legitimately.
Mild hyperbole here.
[+] [-] axaxs|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] berdon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cabaalis|6 years ago|reply
They make this stuff look so official. They use IRS fonts. They print it on pink paper. They write "final notice" when that's meaningless. They have your PII from the public records and make it look like it's from your mortgage group.
That kind of business should be treated as fraud. Who knows how many elderly or otherwise have lost tons of money from these garbage "companies." They should be ashamed.
[+] [-] azinman2|6 years ago|reply
That’s not to say things evolve and regulation should keep up (or that it’s ineffective for its goals), but I don’t understand why there’s such a fervent backlash against it, particularly from the right. It largely feels fueled by those who wish to profit from its undermining, and one particular party has let it be known they’re open for business in that respect.
Did these concerns exist in say, the 1960s? 1910s?
[+] [-] smhinsey|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rootusrootus|6 years ago|reply
And also looking for presorted first class postage. That's a huge giveaway that you're looking at trash.
[+] [-] draw_down|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] umeshunni|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] catalogia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Scoundreller|6 years ago|reply
You did have to apply in person.
And someone did create a page where you could pay $10 and they would wait in line for you.
So at least sometimes you are buying a real service.
[+] [-] Keverw|6 years ago|reply
Then with the new real ID thing I've heard some elder people had to rebuy their birth certificates because the DMV quit accepting the older ones.
[+] [-] ims|6 years ago|reply
Except that these materials can typically be printed out for free, and the letter makes every effort to appear to be a mandatory bill coming from a government agency.
[+] [-] adrr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usaphp|6 years ago|reply
How do they still exist and continue making the same thing? What's the point of this fine if it does not change anything?
[+] [-] whamlastxmas|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cynusx|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] docdeek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goz3rr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|6 years ago|reply
A simple fix would be to dictate, through legislation, that you can't provide a government service such as a copy of your deed at a cost substantially above the cost the government is providing it at.
[+] [-] koolba|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GordonS|6 years ago|reply
They are quite good at looking "official" though, and always have company names that you'd think private companies wouldn't even be permitted to use.
Given how long this has been going on, and given the EU's somewhat notorious legislative machine, it's also quite ridiculous that these scams haven't been outlawed yet.
[+] [-] kohanz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gk1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tylerchilds|6 years ago|reply
I made a faux-website complaining about how easy it would be to create an official looking scam website, particularly how the entire county uses .org domain names.
Fake website: http://sanmateogov.org/
[+] [-] nkrisc|6 years ago|reply
I'm actually more pissed at the OEM for giving these companies my information.
[+] [-] munificent|6 years ago|reply
Jail time. Fines means that the law is simply another part of the business's cost calculations. If the fine is low enough, and it often is, then it can still be "good business" to knowingly break the law, pay the fine, and still pull a profit.
Putting actual law-breaking humans in jail changes the cost-benefit analysis dramatically.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] coding123|6 years ago|reply
Hotels (when you're booking, are you SURE you're booking with the actual hotel?) They may be collecting money to simply reserve the room under your name, but not pay for it - even if they just charged you the same amount. A $119 charge to call the hotel and put in your name.
Health Insurance (When you enter your phone number/email/name there are companies that simply collect money by re-sending your contact info to about 100 sub-scam companies. You may end up with insurance but through the worst types of people that have resold and resold. Oh and don't forget you'll be on some of the WORST robocalling services.
Pretty much all CC fraud "watch" services - especially if your own credit card company signed you up. Taking out a line of credit, if it was not valid - is already something you are protected against. If you have someone to "watch" that stuff for you, it's not really protecting you further.
[+] [-] mcv|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rtb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altacc|6 years ago|reply
In the UK it's free to change your name, you can just write your name change on a peice of paper, get a couple of friends to sign it and you're done. I've done this, but when I tried to explain to someone else the free process they told me I was wrong, citing scam websites with semi-official names that charged for the process.
[+] [-] rsclient|6 years ago|reply
A few days later, my boss showed up with a thank-you gift.
[+] [-] iamben|6 years ago|reply
I've often wondered how many people fall for it (I assume enough they keep doing it), and whether they actually renew them, or just take some money and run.
[+] [-] bt3|6 years ago|reply
I've even had firms purchase other extensions for my domain (particularly a .org, .net, or .co), then email me asking to buy it from them. I usually respond and tell them I'm selling the .com domain myself and they can purchase it directly from me for half of the price they're offering to sell me the other extensions.
No one has ever taken me up on my offer.
[+] [-] _jal|6 years ago|reply
Closely related to fake invoicing, which actually is considered criminal.