I take what I do personally, and I will not mention the name of the company I work for, however, Inside a business I run my own business. Over the past 6 months I have recieved calls from my customers IRATE at the invoices for toner that they have recieved.
There is only one problem. My company includes toner in our agreements.
I have gained a quantifiable loss to these toner pirates who call my customer, say they are from my company, want to verify information and they will send out toner. Once this happens they send out toner with a 300-400% markup and they are able to do it because they speak with someone at these small companies and they say the price of toner is going up so if you buy some now you will not have to pay for the price increase.
First, I contacted the FBI, IRS, and FTC. Through this I was given information that their is a current judgement against Mytel International which is the parent company of IDC and Smith Office. A few years back Toshiba was able to bring them to court and after paying penalties the company had to then make agreements with their telemarketing contacts saying that if they were to mislead customers and they were notified of this occuring that they would have to void the contracts they had together and no longer do buiness.
I did just that. I contacted what I thought to be Michaels home. The person stated that they were best friends. However, Residential listings that are found on the web state that they are or were married at one point living in Thousand Oaks, CA 37 minutes from Culver City. This information was backed up by public records that state that the President of Mytel International and his wife/Best friend donated large sums of money to local state and federal PAC and campaigns for the democratic party. The names were stated as Gilbert Michaels and Holly La Rue Michaels. Holly has since changed her name back to Holly La Rue.
The way I see it these people love animals and hate people. They have a fund which comes out of the culver city address that gives grants to small animal shelters but make a living scamming small business out of hard earned dollars.
In any case these people are scam artists and should not be trusted. Please be an informed consumer. Always ask for some identifiable information from whoever calls you and if you have any doubts, contact your current service provider to confirm. You should always be the one initiating the conversation when toner is needed for your company.
Best of luck to everyone out there. I hope the FTC is able to whack them again. This guy has lived in some serious mansions in his day. I hope the FBI arrests him as well for the fraud he is commiting accross state lines.
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