By
Kenneth Long on February 3, 2012
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Have you received unsolicited junk texts from a payday lender? I have received 3 such texts within the past week:
Need some extra FUND$ for the new year? You can easily get $15OO today, just visit www.Click4PayToday.com to get the funds. Write "NO" to end.
One of the unsolicited texts also cited www.1stDollarSpot.com. After some research, it appears there are dozens of similar sites attributed to a couple of criminal actors. Here are a couple of the sites and their corresponding owners public information:
- www.Click4PayToday.com, Owner is Craig Anderson, 851-795-3251, craiganderson205@gmail.com, 272 Pine Brook Rd, Teeterson, CA 92654 (zip code is for Laguna Hills, CA)
- www.1stDollarSpot.com, Owner is Ben Mordston, 949-421-7858, benmordston877@gmail.com, 21 Frostbank Rd, Pico, CA 92672 (zip code is for San Clemente)
The information provided is
not accurate. We contacted their registrar, Internet.bs to inquire about whether their terms of service allow for false information to be provided in lieu of a private registration via proxy. The registrar is accredited by ICANN and is based in the Bahamas. Upon contacting the registrar, I was advised to report the activity to their Abuse Department, which I promptly did.
In addition to nonexistent addresses, you may note the similarity in formatting of the emails. Also, the actual text messages were identical with the exception of the actual website that they were promoting. They both used "$15OO" rather than "$1500", prefering to use a capital "o" in place of a zero.
None of the payday lenders were known by the Better Business Bureau. Each of these cases appear to be boiler room style operations, meaning that the scammers will exploit the site for a short period of time, and then abandon it before the heat comes. They normally have dozens of similar websites operating at any point in time, making it difficulty for regulators to identify them as a large scale threat and shut them down.
These are not direct lenders. They are simply brokers that sell leads to payday lenders. They use illegal methods to advertise and then profit from the sale of leads to their clients, the payday companies themselves.
If you receive one of these texts, the best thing you can do is report the activity to the Federal Trade Commission. Make sure that you identify the website, since that will be the only accurate identifying information from the text. The sending telephone number should also be listed, but understand that it is a spoofed number. The spammers are just borrowing someone else's telephone number to avoid detection.