4 Wise Monkeys

ACCC goes after Clarion

You remember those scratchcards from our friends at Clarion? (hint: scroll down!)

Well, that promotion has landed them in hot water with the ACCC who have ordered an interim injunction against the company requiring them to send a free SMS to all customers informing them of the costs of claiming their prizes.

From the ACCC website:

The ACCC has filed proceedings in the Federal Court against Clarion seeking declarations that publishing the scratch cards was misleading and deceptive in breach of the Act, as well as an order that Clarion send an SMS to all subscribers notifying them of the outcome of the proceedings and directing them to contact their telecommunications provider.

In the same article the ACCC also outlines their actions against two other providers, TMG and Teracomm for similar behaviour in addition to publishers of youth magazines, requiring them to improve advertising standards.

Read the full article here.

Posted by k on 07.15.2009 at 9:51 am // Have your say »
Tagged: Featured, Mobile, Phone, SMS, Scams, ACCC, clarion, SMS

The Luck of the Irish (part 2)

Here is the next update on the Irish Gavin and Iain McConnon broth

ers from “Clarion Marketing”, Moviestar”, “Global Billing”, “Prime Media”, “Promocom Ireland”, “Falcon Telecom”, “Puppy Promotions”, “Promotion Payments”, “Value Group”, “Parcel Plus” and all the other aliases they “work” under. 

We were contacted by their Australian Lawyers, “Axis Legal Pty Ltd”, bragging about “Defamation” of the Irish “businessmen” Iain and Gavin McConnon on our blog, and demanding to pull the post about their Scratchcard “promotions” in Australia. 

Allegedly, our following statements are “false and baseless” – namely that their “clients” are: 

1. running an “unwinnable scratch-card scam”
2. “behind possibly the most egregious scam-scratch card campaigns”
3. responsible for the Star Promotions Club Scratch cards; and
4. breaching the Trade Practices Act 1974

Well, after thinking about all this, we decided that we really don’t need to publish any “defamatory statements” about the brothers.

Instead, we thought we provide you with a few other articles we found about the poor guys who are suffering so much from our false and baseless statements. 

The following “work related” articles give more insight into the network of aliases and companies run by Gavin Mc Connon and Iain Mc Connon and the sort of “promotions” these companies run: 

Premium rate scam from Promocom

Read full article here: http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2005/04/premium-rate-scam-from-promoco.html

FILTHY rich and at the wheel of a £105,000 Ferrari - this is phone creep Gavin McConnon. With his brother Iain he’s behind those nasty letters sent to tens of thousands of British homes. 

The envelope contains “cheques” written out to the recipient for up to £75,000 and the letter, headed Value Group, says, “with these cheques you are guaranteed to receive cash”.

It explains that to claim you have to make four calls, one for each “cheque”. And hidden away at the bottom of the letter it explains that the calls will cost £1.50 a minute.

So if you call all four claim lines - which each waffle on for seven minutes - you’ll spend £42.

Despite the “guarantee” most don’t win cash - but end up with hefty phone bills. A small number will win money and prizes, but most get holiday vouchers with a string of conditions attached. (…) 
 

Irish premium line companies banned in Britain

Read full article here: http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2006/04/16/story13461.asp

An Irish company that was fined €72,000 on St Patrick’s Day for running a premium-rate phone line promotion in Britain was fined and banned three times last year, a Sunday Business Post investigation can reveal (…).

The brothers’ (McConnon) companies have been the subject of a number of media probes in Britain.

BBC’s Inside Out team investigated a scratch card promotion where recipients were told they had won stg£50,000, a car or other valuable prizes.

After ringing a premium rate number at stg£1.50 a minute, the Inside Out team discovered it had actually won a DVD and holiday vouchers.

The Guardian also carried out an investigation. Reporter Miles Brignall said hundreds of thousands of British households last year received personalised letters, including four ‘‘prize cheques’’, from the McConnons’ Value Group.

Readers were led to believe that they had won up to stg£75,000 (…).

Dublin brothers reported for renting out retail DVDs

Read full article here: http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2006/09/10/story17108.asp

Two Dublin brothers who set up a DVD-rental business have been reported to film companies for breaching copyright by renting out retail DVDs.

Gavin and Iain McConnon launched their online DVD rental service, Moviestar.ie, last month. However, the company has been unable to obtain sufficient copies of rental DVDs from film companies and has been buying DVDs from shops and renting these out instead (…).

McConnon brothers fined GBP 70k over mock-cheque scam

Read full article here: http://blogs.mirror.co.uk/investigations/2005/08/mcconnon-brothers-fined-70k-ov.html


THE companies behind a “mock cheques” scam that we exposed earlier this year have been fined a total of £70,000.

In April we told how the Ferrari-driving McConnon brothers of Dublin were making a fortune from a string of phone cons which promised callers up to £75,000 in prizes.

Under names including Falcon Telecom and Value Group they sent thousands of people what looked like cheques.

To claim the supposed winnings you had to call a series of expensive phone lines which made money for Iain and Gavin McConnon via their business Promocom Ireland Ltd.

Now the Falcon Telecom brand and three companies that assisted the McConnons have been fined.

The premium-rate phone watchdog ICSTIS has ruled against two “prize draws” which breached regulations on no fewer than 14 grounds.

More articles here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/yorkslincs/series8/week_eight.shtml (you have to scroll down a little to read about their “Scratch card promotions”

http://www.consumerdirect-yorkshireandthehumber.gov.uk/news/press/2006/125-06

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/892995.html 

Clarion’s lawyers’ letter states further that “their clients have suffered damage as a result of the publication of the statements (on 4wisemonkeys), including to business reputation, which gives rise to causes of action including defamation and the tort of injurious falsehood”. 

Well guys, sorry – if you do not want to be called scammers, then simply do not scam people. It appears that your network of companies is like cancer all over the world.

We say – McConnon brothers, leave Australia alone!

If any of you out there want to apologise for the “numerous phone calls and emails” the brothers received as a result of our statements, here are their contact details AGAIN. And NO, scammers – we will NOT remove these, no matter what you threaten next.

Iain Mc Connon

c/- Promocom, Suite 322, The Capel Building, Marys Abbey, Dublin 7, Ireland

ph +353 1 889 8600
 fax +3531 889 8601 
mobile +353 86 811 7071 Email iain@promocom.ie 

Gavin Mc Connon

c/- Moviestar Entertainment Ltd, Suite 322, The Capel Building, Marys Abbey, Dublin 7, Ireland

ph +353 86 811 6690 
Email gavin@moviestar.ie 

Posted by k on 05.29.2009 at 10:04 am // 1 Comment »
Tagged: Featured, Mobile, Phone, SMS, Scams, McConnon, moby planet, SMS

Luck of the Irish

For legal reasons we have been asked to remove this post about the McConnon brothers. 

We have decided to simply comply and let others speak for us.

Posted by k on 05.28.2009 at 3:15 pm // 3 Comments »
Tagged: Featured, Mobile, Phone, SMS, Scams, clarion, moby planet, scam, Scams, SMS

News on the Missed Call Marketing Story

We have been contacted by Mr Kelvin Evans who has threatened legal action if we do not remove the information provided by COB today. 

Mr Evans claims that he is not the mastermind behind the Missed Call Marketing scheme, of course not knowing the evidence we have at hand. Suffice to say it would stand up nicely in court if it ever went that far.

However, we thought it would be fair to offer Mr Evans a chance to convince us and have asked for answers to the following questions (not all questions are published here):

• Is it true that you programmed a dialler which systematically dialled mobile numbers in Australia with the only purpose to leave a caller ID on the recipient’s phone, so the mobile phone user would be enticed to call the number back?
• Is it true that you offered this dialler to multiple clients in order to run all kinds of promotions?
• Is it true that for providing this service, you received a revenue share of the monies earned on 1900 numbers used for the promotions?
• Is it true that only 190 service bureaus - like Info FM - can get 190 numbers provisioned?

Posted by k on 05.20.2009 at 2:20 pm // 1 Comment »
Tagged: Featured, Mobile, Phone, SMS, Scams, 190, InfoFM, missed call marketing

Telstra vs Oxygen 8 – a PR exercise?

Telstra is obviously continuing to attempt to polish their public image and make a PR victory out of their own failures.

As you know, we’re more than happy to out dodgy premium sms scams, but one thing we can’t agree with (particularly in today’s harsh economic climate) is the ruination of a company for purely political gain. What’s truly sad is that the media have also decided that there’s nothing to be gained by fair and unbiased reporting.

In this article in last month’s Australian, reporter Andrew Colley provides us with a positively gleeful account of Telstra’s harassment of aggregator Oxygen8.

Telstra’s reason? A continued high level of complaints, something which we know to be farcical and a scapegoat for their own disastrously poor customer service.

We have since undertaken a little research and will continue to do so. We were interested in both sides of the story and – through our contacts – found out the following:

RESEARCH

(1) Obviously, Telstra is responsible for the biggest chunk of complaints, completely out of scope with their market share in the Premium SMS market.

Talking to 4 aggregators, Telstra’s share of the premium market in the Month of March was 16%.

2) Complaint figures: Now this is the interesting part – the TIO report actually assigns a much higher percentage of complaints to Telstra than their market share:

As is plain from the above chart, Telstra’s share of complaints is vastly outweighed by their market share.

As is plain from the above chart, Telstra’s share of complaints is vastly outweighed by their market share.

(3) The court judgement dated 29 April 2009 includes a few statements that we wanted to know more about. In particular:

• On page 5, paragraph 18, it states that Telstra maintains that there were 139 escalated complaints in December 2008 and 123 in January 2009. The Applicant (Oxygen8) calculates that number at 3. This is a significant difference.We spoke to our aggregator contacts and were advised that generally, Telstra counts “internal referrals” as escalated complaints – meaning customers call Telstra and end up there, as they are NOT given the service providers 1300 number to sort their issues out.

This means that a first complaint at Telstra is counted as an escalated complaint. This does not sound very reasonable, as a complaint to our information must only be counted as “escalated” if the party who the customer complains about fails to sort out the issue (at least this is the procedure the TIO grants the carriers, and Optus and Vodafone do actually grant their aggregator partners).

With Telstra, an “internal referral” appears to be sufficient, which makes the number of “escalated complaints” subject to Telstra’s creativity.

We tried to reach Telstra to find out more about this “internal referral” process but our requests remained unheard.

• On page 4, paragraph 16, the Judgment quotes a Telstra letter dated 24 December 2007:

“61% of complainants did not request the content of a service provided”

This quote is then directly taken up by “The Australian” and is presented as a fact in the article.

We researched a few figures, most of them can be found in the TIO report on

http://www.tio.com.au/publications/annual_reports/ar2008/annual_2008_17.html

Some recent TIO data proves the figure of 61% wrong:

… And now compared to other areas of the Telecommunications industry:

DEVELOPMENT

We were made aware that a new code for Premium Services provides a great deal of consumer protection for premium services.

We say: It’s about time, and it’s good.

Major changes include a so-called double opt-in, meaning customers who request a service by sending a message into a shortcode MUST reconfirm their request. That is you’ll receive a message which MUST inform you about:

• cost and frequency of the messages you will receive
• customer care helpline
• Opt out information

Then it asks you to send ANOTHER message to confirm you’re ok with this.

Then – and ONLY then – can you be billed for a service.

IF ANY OF THE ABOVE HAS NOT BEEN FOLLOWED AFTER 1 JULY THIS YEAR, YOU CAN CLAIM YOUR MONEY BACK. If they don’t give it to you voluntarily, you can get it enforced by ACMA and the service provider will be in trouble.

NEXT QUESTION THOUGH:

Who helps you with the much bigger issues (according to the TIO report) like Telstra’s customer service, billing issues, faults, contracts etc ?

TELSTRA’S OWN FAILURES

We refer to a very good example, representative of what (according to the figures) must be the typical Telstra customer experience, as described in The Australian, Page 29 (Sat 25 Oct 2008)

“Welcome to Telstra. In just a few words, please tell us the reason for your call. You have been placed in a queue. Longer than normal delays will occur.

I’ve been trying to get hooked up since August. It took several weeks and hissy fits to get a home phone connected, only to be cut off twice in error. No such efficiency with my old number: I’ve been billed for calls made by someone else after Telstra failed, or forgot, to disconnect the old phone. Now, having signed a contract for a mobile phone (yep, slow learner), I’m still waiting for it to function two weeks later. Computer glitch, supposedly.
During one of my many rants to a service call-centre, I threatened to lodge a complaint with the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. “You can do what you like, luv,” the bloke drawled down the line. “But the ombudsman isn’t going to get your phone working.”

We’ll see how shutting down one aggregator will help with that.

Telstra is scapegoating Oxygen8 (and has their eyes set on at least two other aggregators) to take the blame for their own woefully deficient customer service record. In this way, they deflect blame from themselves while simultaneously appearing to be the good-guys, a corporate Senator Conroy wannabe: ‘tough on whatever is politically expedient’.

CONCLUSION

Long story short – he who lives in a glass house shouldn’t throw stones. Comments welcome.

Posted by k on 05.04.2009 at 1:51 pm // Have your say »
Tagged: Aggregators, Carriers, Featured, Phone, SMS, Telcos, Telstra, Telstra Mobile, Telstra Scams

Telechoice bad customer service

We’ve just had word from Carl that Telechoice in Warringah Mall are behaving badly. Here’s what Carl has to say:

I just wanted to alert everyone to the most appalling customer service I’ve just experienced at the Telechoice branch in the Warringah Mall (Shop 175-176).

On 26 February, we purchased a Virgin Mobile pre-paid card and USB dongle. After following the procedure for activating the SIM and then the instructions on the CD for installation, we were unable to connect to the internet.

Upon calling Virgin technical support we were helped very graciously by their phone support staff, but after two hours of attempts, we were still unable to get online. I then spent several hours researching the issue, found the numerous problems OS X users have experienced with this specific dongle and attempted all of the fixes that seemed reasonable.

Despite having setup numerous USB 3G modems from Optus, Vodafone and 3, I was completely unable to get this working and after four hours of trying had had enough. We needed to get online that day as we were otherwise without internet access so we were forced to go out and purchase an UnWired modem and plan – which of course worked immediately.

Upon attempting to return the original Virgin products to Telechoice they were extremely rude and abrupt, questioning our intelligence and claiming that the SIM had not been activated. We informed them that this had been done and that we had spent over two hours on technical support with Virgin and this had not been posited as a problem.

That made absolutely no difference to the staff at Telechoice and they simply refused to take the product back, despite the fact that neither I nor Virgin tech support could get it working. They were not interested in the fact that we had already purchased an alternative broadband device and plan that worked instantly and refused point blank to take the product back. They informed us they could activate it in-store and that that was our only option. As we accepted, they tried to get rid of us by telling us that this could take “up to two hours”. They again questioned our intelligence by telling us how simple the activation process was and that we should have done this to start with – again, not caring or willing to listen that we had already done so.

Finally, we asked for their ABN number so we could pursue a complaint against them and they refused that also. At this point I had enough and raised my voice somewhat demanding the return of my receipt that I had given as proof of purchase – but they verbally threatened me and demanded I leave store or they would call security.

Obviously we’re not letting this lie – we’ll be pursuing this through the small claims court and any other body, such as the Department of Fair Trading and the ACCC. Also we will inform Optus as these guys are an official Optus Dealer. We think Optus should be more careful with the selection of their retail partners.

I’m shocked and appalled by the actions of this retailer – they were rude, belligerent and uncaring from the outset and I urge everyone to avoid them in the future. And the best thing is – they cannot blame it on the staff member James, as it finally was the shop manager who “kicked me out”.

We’re putting the call out - anyone else been ripped off by Telechoice?

Posted by k on 03.04.2009 at 12:54 pm // 7 Comments »
Tagged: Carriers, Featured, Mobile, Phone, Scams, Telcos, ripoff, scam, Telechoice, Virgin

Vision 6 Responds

In response to our previous post on Vision6, their marketing manager has written in to explain their side of the story:

My name is Lisa Renneisen and I am the marketing manager for Vision 6. I just wanted to clarify the situation with regards to your post about the Vision 6 Woolworths premium SMS scam; 

Vision 6 is a email marketing platform that allows clients to upload their marketing databases and then send emails and sms messages to these lists. Similar to how hotmail or gmail - we are just the provider of a platorm - we do not control the content that our clients send. 

That being said, all our clients are expected to comply with the ACMA spam guidelines and when we are alerted to unacceptable practices, we will intervene.

With specific regards to the Woolworths issue, what was happening was emails were being sent using our system which took people to a landing page outside of our system that encouraged the entering of a mobile number. Subsequently the flow of premium rated SMS messages began. These were not sent through our system.

Technically this flow was is not illegal, though due to the dubious ethical questions, we took action to deactivate the account responsible to prevent further emails being sent. Beyond these actions, there was nothing further we could do.

If you could please ensure this is commented on with the post or the post removed entirely it would be appreciated. 

I understand the concern and value in sharing the information on such scams, but I hope you can also appreciate that this is not our fault and its not great to be incorrectly linked.

Posted by k on 03.04.2009 at 12:52 pm // Have your say »
Tagged: Internet, Mobile, Phone, SMS, Scams, Vision6

As promised, the DC-Marketing dirt

When we first came together, Team 4WM decided that our first order of business should be to investigate DC-Marketing, the original scammers behind the infamous missed-call-marketing scheme in 2006.

Originally it was thought that a large European consortium was behind the scheme. However, working with our colleagues in the industry, we’ve uncovered the real low-down.

The whole thing was set up by a Melbourne based company, called Info Access, trading under different guises and names, some of which included InfoFM and PJ’s ONE900 PTY.LTD.

They are situated in 110 Chapel Street, Windsor, 3181 Victoria.

The mastermind and director of the scam was a Mr Kelvin Evans.

We think it is important to reveal this information to the public, as the “scapegoat”, DC Marketing Europe Ltd, was nothing other than a supplier company for this operation. Being based in Europe it was all fairly anonymous and the mastermind thought he was untouchable. When the shit hit the fan Mr Evans could not be identified as the mastermind because ACMA concentrated on chasing the local representation of the company, which at that time was nothing else than a highly paid law firm.

Evans managed to get away with not-quite-murder and continues to run his scams and 190 “promotions” even now (Predominantly call out promotions where you get  called out of the blue and a recorded voice tells you you’ve won a prize)

He also managed to distract attention from himself by trying to blame other individuals who were peripherally connected to the DC Marketing/Info Access scheme. Scapegoats included:

• Other 190 providers who copied the scheme (Despite a $150k fine for the shelf company this was never announced to be illegal by ACMA, as missed call marketing to date still has not been included into the Spam Act 2003)
• Companies and individuals who worked as web designers and web masters for the different URL’s held by Evans and therefore had their names published on Whois entries
• Secretaries, Local Agents, officers who were employed or worked as contractors for Evans

We have been provided with documents which could stand up in court to bust Evans, however our job is not to bust these guys but to inform you the public of the truth.

Stay tuned for more information.

Posted by k on 11.27.2008 at 3:00 pm // 2 Comments »
Tagged: Featured, Mobile, Phone, SMS, Scams, Busted, DC-Marketing, Info Access, Info FM, Kelvin Evans, scam

Hyarchis responds!

In an unusual twist, Hyarchis has responded to ACMA’s earlier announcement of a formal spam warning. From Secure Computing:

Hyarchis has described the formal warning issued to it by ACMA over alleged SMS spam as a ‘slap in the face’ that sets a dangerous precedent for the entire web marketing industry.

The firm premium SMS marketing firm, which was last week formally warned by ACMA for alleged breaches of the Spam Act, has expressed its disappointment over the ruling, which SC understands involved three SMS messages sent to a single customer.

Full article here

Posted by k on 11.27.2008 at 7:07 am // Have your say »
Tagged: Featured, Phone, SMS, ACMA, Hyarchis, Spam