Hans Smit
Agoura,#2REBUTTAL Individual responds
Mon, August 20, 2012
You are a very clever detective!
However... you are also major stupid.
SBN no longer exists as a active company, and I am unemployed like a few others in the US.
If SBN does anything, it is done by Robb Evans and associates (the court appointed receiver)
If you read all of the FTC stuff you would know we were permanently shut down by the FTC / receiver on June 2 2010. ( our systems stopped working that day around 10am pst)
My statement was (and is today) we never made any of these calls, and we were never involved in running a telemarketing operation.
We were a service provider, and we had many customers, and some were telemarketers yes.
The calls went though our servers..yes but we did not control any of those calls, other than making sure the servers worked.
Our customers had full controll of their own accounts and projects, we did not involve ourselves in their bizz, kind of like the email provider who had a spammer for a customer.
If you read the settlement signed by the judge in march of this year you will see a permanent ban on me being involved with any telemarketing. Do you think I would be stupid enough to violate a court order??
We tried to keep our customers respectfull of the law (I am sure this is where you want to put a hateful remark and that is ok). However... since we were killed consumer complaints (and on the SAME CALLS ) have risen 500% (data reported by the FTC themselves)
My position is that this was caused by others realizing that trying to keep down consumer grief by scrubbing and doing removal and other things do not help 1 bit once the ftc shows up.
They do not care about what you did right, they only care about what you did wrong, and so the better choice is to simply throw all the rules out the window and hide.
This is what our former customers are doing.(they were and are the source of the calls)
You will not agree (and that is you right) , but my opinion is that the increased harrasment of consumers, and the fact that it is now impossible to stop it, is a unintended (?) side effect of the FTC cracking down on service providers and caller ID companies.
So.... 5x as many consumer complaints, means job and budget security and growth for the FTC workers and the politically appointed comissiones have numbers to waive and ask for more budget.
Life is good when you are a civil servant I guess.
You screw it up and you get more money to .. you guess.
What is happening today is clear evidence that we were not the ones doing this, and teh FTC certainly has not stopped it despite more budget.
As for others being sued.. I know many people in the industry, but a assumption that I woul dhave anything to do with that is unfounded.
Call the FTC if you do not believe me... 312-960-5630 Steve Wernikoff or 312-960-5634 Jim Davis.
PS the FTC was helpful to all telemarketers by posting the Rachel prompt on their website (you can download it there), so anyone could download it and use it in their marketing campaign. I would call that aiding and abetting.
ThePrizeVan
Bowie,#3Consumer Comment
Mon, August 20, 2012
This link shows you as a GenuTec board member with Roy M. Cox who also has been sued by the FTC.
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/st ... vcapId=23957705
http://www.ftc.gov/os/caselist/0923193/index.shtm
And now-
Missouri sues Randy Cox Jr. and Castle Rock Capital Management out of California.
http://www.legalnewsline.com/news/236974-koster-sues-five-companies-over-calls
Koster filed the lawsuit against Marketing Strategy Group of Hungary, Transfers Argentina SA of Argentina, Capital Solutions Group SA, Castle Rock Management SA, Castle Rock Capital Management and Randy Cox, Jr., a Calif. resident who is the owner of the five corporations.
One source indicates that Roy Michael Cox may also be using Randy Cox as a possible alias name.
StJohn
Biloxi,#4Author of original report
Thu, May 10, 2012
State fines firm
$945,000 for no-call violations
Fine is largest Mississippi has ever issued to a telemarketer
JACKSON Mississippi,
-- Not only are those telemarketing robocalls from card services annoying, theyre also illegal, especially if youve signed up for a federal or state do not call list.
Mississippi...utility regulators Tuesday fined a California telemarketer $945,000, in an effort to get such calls to stop. Its the largest fine that the Mississippi Public Service Commission has ever issued against a telemarketer.
The order was issued against Roy M. Cox Jr. of Santa Ana, Calif., and five companies he controls. The commission said Cox broke Mississippis law against unwanted telephone solicitations 189 times in the last four years.
Northern District Commissioner Brandon Presley said in February that Cox was operating possibly the largest telemarketing scam to hit Mississippi since the auto warranty scam a few years ago.
Cox and associated companies also face a civil suit filed by the Federal Trade Commission last year in California. A lawyer representing Cox in the federal case did not immediately respond to phone and email messages Tuesday. The Mississippi fine was assessed after Cox failed to respond to legal papers served on him by the state. Mississippi assessed the maximum fine of $5,000 for each legal violation that it documented. Go find that check, Southern District Commissioner Leonard Bentz said after the
commission voted. Under state and federal law, people who dont want to get telephone solicitations
sign up for a do not call list.
Telephone solicitors are supposed to acquire that list and not call those people, with certain exemptions. The state says Cox and his companies failed to register before starting business in Mississippi, didnt buy a copy of the states do not call list, were placing illegal robocalls, and were calling outside the time window allowed under state law. The companies were also illegally hiding their names on caller ID, instead listing themselves as card services, credit services, or private office, according to the federal case. The state complaint says Cox operates through a web of companies, including California-based Castle Rock Capital Management as well as Castle Rock mnagement SA and Capital Solutions Group SA, both of Panama, as well as Transfers Argentina SA of Argentina and Marketing Strategy Group of Hungary.
The federal complaint also says that Cox worked through a Seychelles company called Public Service. It isnt named in the Mississippi order. Federal
authorities said Coxs companies sell credit card interest rate reduction programs, extended automobile warranties and home security systems. The federal suit was filed by the FTC in partnership with the Justice Department, which could allow the government to seek civil penalties of $16,000 per violation if it wins. In response to the federal lawsuit, a lawyer for Cox denied that he was a telemarketer, had brooken the law, or controlled the foreign companies. Cox can appeal the Mississippi fine to Hinds county Chancery Court. Jeff Jernigan, a staff attorney for the Mississippi Public Service Commission, said
the state could try to collect the judgment by filing liens on houses Cox owns in California and Tennessee. The commission is still working on collecting its previous largest fine, the $490,000 that it fined Joel Katz of Baltimore last fall. Katz was convicted in federal court in 2002 for defrauding 16,000 people out of more than $1.6 million. Mississippi officials said he went back to his old ways while still on
probation.
Bentz said the commission would love to have some more authority from the Legislature to collect these fines. He also said hed like to see a law allowing jail terms for unauthorized telemarketers.
A bill failed in the Legislature this year that would have also outlawed solicitation by fax and text message and would have added paid solicitors for charities to the list of people forbidden to call.
StJohn
Biloxi,#5Author of original report
Sat, April 14, 2012
I am the person who wrote the origional complaint. I am now getting 3 calls each day from this phone number and I do not have a credit card. If you lost your company and are now destitute, then so be it. I want to be left alone by telemarketers.
You provided the means for someone to send out these calls and now you call foul, that it is not your fault. But did you try to prevent your costomers from illegial activity? Did you report these companies to the authorities? Did you cut off their services? Did you even monitor their activities or how they used your services?
Three calls each day is certainly too much. One each day is too much. All I want is for these people to stop and leave me alone.
As for your losing your job, maybe now you will have time to go out and get an honest job like the rest of us.
Neva
oxford,#6Consumer Comment
Sat, April 14, 2012
So if I understand this correctly, you are claiming that though your company did make annoying calls, you were busted. And as a result of being busted, you began fighting the FTC to once again have your company begin to make those annoying calls. But you argue making those annoying calls is better for the consumer than radio, tv, and direct mail.
Either way, you had a extremely annoying company that I am glad is out of business.
Hans Smit
Agoura,#7REBUTTAL Owner of company
Sat, April 14, 2012
The annonymous person posting here calls me an "idiot" ( I support free speech, so that is ok) but in the process of posting he/she is actually showing limited rational thinking him/her self.
He is also mis-representing the information by casually tieing us to things we have nothing to do with.
Understandably people are seriously frustrated by the enormous amounts of telemarketing calls they are getting daily, and how they are unable to stop them more than ever before. Some of these angry consumers become "detectives" and "activists" deriving some form of personal satisfaction from exposing those that supposedly make these calls, pointing to any appointed bad guy makes them feel good I guess.
In this case people simply do not read or do not understand what it means if the federal government takes down a company, or what the logical implications of those actions are.
Our company was a internet based telecommunication service provider ( there are many such companies) and we provided people / companies / government / politicians that wanted to do message delivery, or notification or surveys or telemarketing in various forms with a intergrated solution.
We saw ourselves as the ISP of message delivery, no more than the vehicle to perform a service (like internet service providers, or newspaper or radio or tv which are all services).
Through our service customers could upload lists of numbers to call, and voice prompts ( the message to be delivered ) and controll all aspects of a telecom marketing campaign through a browser.We had about 300 customers using this service and tehy all signed " voice broadcast agreements" stating they would not be violating the law, an dthey would be responsible if they did.
We had politicians use our service ( Obama campaign, Bush , various DA's and many local and state politicians and other election services like political surveys )
We also had emergency notification customers ( our systems called 400000 people in a few hours when Katrina was about to hit warning people in low lareas to leave ) We had fortune 500 companies (or their marketing arms) use our services to provide their sales floor with inbound leads, and we had various resellers and telemarketing firms who bought our integrated access service.
When you have that many customers there are always a few bad apples, and we alledgedly had some also.
The ftc tracked a significant number of complaints about some of our customers and decided they wanted to try a new approach: take down the people that provide services to the people doing telemarketing instead of individually attacking the many small marketing rooms.
And so they prepared a lawsuit against us under seal, based on the supposed wrong-doing by our customers , and they tracked down all of our assets before they attacked. It was easy to find us, since we were not hiding anything, since we believed we were following the law. On june 2 2010 the receiver ( who is currently in control of SBN Inc ) took down all our infrastructure and seized all our corporate documents (including ALL customer information), while a court order froze all of our bank accounts and other assets before we were even served with the lawsuit.
We were being accused of "aiding and abetting" fraudulent telemarketers.
This means that as of June 2 2010 not a single call was made by anyone through our service, and we have been spending 100% of our energy fighting with the ftc, which ended up not being much of a fight, because the ftc controlled our money (and decided when and if our attorney would get paid...) making us effectively powerless. After 18 month of this we simply had to lay down our heads and settle (without any admission of guilt) and hand over everything we ever earned from any activity ever to the ftc, leaving us with lots of debt and no way to pay it, so effectively we are bankrupt. (I am sure you are all cheering right now! )
What was the effect of this ftc action against service provider SBN for the consumer ?
We were known in the industry as a service provider that aimed to follow the rules to the best of our abilities. for example we actually had WORKING removal servers that REALLY REMOVED numbers from our customers call lists if people called back the caller id's displayed. We were also very much discouraging our customers from calling cell phones (blocking acces to tehm by default) , and made sure our customers lists were scrubbed against the federal DNC unless they had written opt in numbers.When the ftc took us down it caused a big uproar in the dialing industry ( exactly what the ftc hoped for I am sure) but it did not have the result the ftc was looking for....or maybe it did.
Telemarketers, and especially those who were not following the rules , simply said: trying to live by the rules obviously does not help at all in the end, see what happened to SBN.
So they stopped caring about things like not calling cell phones or respecting the federal dnc or doing any form of removal when people asked not to be called.After June 2010 nationwide complaints MORE THAN DOUBLED over complaints in 2009, showing a massive disrespect by telemarketers for any law, because it was clear that none of that made a difference once the ftc knocks. Going offshore , using voip and prepaid cell phones in call centers became popular ways to hide.
The unintended result of a government action?? maybe not...
In 2011 the ftc decided to go after caller id providers (the number showing on a marketing call) leading to marketers abandoning numbers that pointed to working removal gateways, and massively starting to use non-existing numbers or numbers belonging to others....
This effectivly made it even much harder for consumers to call back anyone or and be removed from call lists.
Another unitended ??? result of the ftc's actions, making the telemarketing pain for consumers worse....
So, now we are personally broke and tired, without income and ready to file chapter 7 ( you all cheer again!)
But the consumer is worse off than ever before, despite many more tax dollars being spend on the ftc...
People trying to find those who are actually making these calls point at us...because ???????
The logic eludes me.My response is and always has been : we were not the ones making the calls in 2010, and we certainly are not the ones making ANY calls (legal or otherwise) since 2010.
The only way to stop this (in my personal opinion) is to follow the money generated by for example Rachel upstream...to those who buy the leads from the many Rachel call centers, and it should be easy to trace that money (it might even lead to a fortune 500).
However..if you did that it might stop the complaints, and no complaints means less political support for more ftc budget...
I feel bad for all consumers being victims of any scam, and there are LOTS , and they are not limited to telemarketers.
The same people using telemarketing advertise by direct mail ( that is supposedly ok ), radio (that is supposeldy ok) , newspapers (that is supposedly ok) and television (that is supposedly ok also).
There are thousands of scams that are actually acceptable and legal because lobbyists shared the wealth.
Many actions by the ftc actually increased suffering by the consumers.
The (political appointed) ftc commisioners are firmly convinced they are doing the right thing for the consumers.
are you?
Jon Leibowitz FTC Chairman Phone: 202-326-3400 Email: [email protected] or [email protected]
Phone: 202-326-3400 Julie Brill FTC CommissionerEmail: [email protected]: 303-326-2054 Edith Ramirez FTC CommissionerEmail: [email protected]: 202-326-2856 J. Thomas Rosch FTC CommissionerPhone: 202-326-3651