THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 20, 1995 TAG: 9502170009
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
The barrage of regulations with which the Federal Trade Commission plans to combat gross telemarketing abuses won't stop intrusive and often inconveniently timed calls from merchandisers, pollsters and fund-raisers. But the proposed regulations would set back many of the hustlers who now telephonically defraud gullible, confused and greedy Americans of tens of billions dollars annually.
That's their purpose, which most telemarketers welcome. They object to changes, including a rule that would ban early-morning and after-6 p.m. calls, and their objections will be formally lodged during the mandated comment period just begun.
Some fraudmeisters may also object. These are the characters who complicate life for telemarketers representing honest enterprises. Their specialty is deceptive practices to separate the unwary, witless and distracted from their money.
The FTC's draft regulations - which would implement telemarketing-fraud legislation enacted by Congress last year - target ruses used by unscrupulous telemarketers.
The regulations would prohibit the phony you-have-been-selected-for-a-prize ploy.
Telemarketers also would be prohibited from claiming (1) affiliation with government and (2) ability to recover money and lost property and to upgrade consumers' credit records or loan eligibility regardless of credit history. They would not be allowed to offer express-courier pickup of payments. They would be required to disclose the risks, potential profits or market and liquidation value of investments.
Last year's anti-fraud regulation has strengthened the ability of states' attorneys general to bring federal-court lawsuits against out-of-state telemarketing firms to obtain nationwide judgments against them.
The federal legislation was necessary to check the expansion of predatory telemarketing schemes that victimize the elderly most of all but also the general public, including small businesses, the jobless, the poor, single women, investors and anybody else dumb enough to be taken in.
Nineteenth-century con men and con women saw the United States as ``the big store'' with an inexhaustible supply of suckers. They weren't wrong. The country still abounds in what those earlier hustlers called ``marks.'' Most marks are undone by their own greed. They wouldn't be if they remembered that generally any deal that sounds too good to be true is just that. Today's dishonest telemarketers, many of them picking pockets for phony ``charities,'' work from ``sucker lists.
That a great many Americans are patsies for fradulent pitches through the telephone is by now copiously documented in the files of local, state and federal governmental offices, consumer advocates and Better Business Bureaus. Of course, the best defense against telephone crooks is a well-informed and properly skeptical populace able to just say No! to the hustlers and hang up. But outlawing shoddy practices and penalizing hustlers and penalties up to $10,000 for each offense are prescribed by the proposed rules were overdue. by CNB