Sale of cellphone records ends in $600,000 fine: FTC goes after pretexters

The Federal Trade Commission said it snuffed out an alleged pretexting scheme in which at least two parties were accused of obtaining cellphone records from wireless carriers by impersonating subscribers and later selling the confidential data to third parties.
The FTC said it reached settlements with the defendants, who agreed to pay judgments totaling more than $600,000 – the approximate amount of revenue gained through pretexting – without admitting guilt to the government’s charges. The settlement between the FTC and defendants was approved by a federal judge in Florida.
In its lawsuit against two of the defendants – Cassandra Selvage and Eye in the Sky Investigations Inc. – the FTC said that since November 2004 the firm’s Web site advertised: “YOU GIVE US A CELLULAR NUMBER WITH THE NAME, ADDRESS, SS#, WE GIVE YOU A LIST OF THE CALLS MADE PER MONTH.”
The FTC said that since 2006 – the year Congress made pretexting a criminal offense subject to fines and imprisonment – it has cracked down on 16 individuals charged with violating the new law and recovered money made by the illegal practice.
The Federal Communications Commission last year imposed additional requirements on wireless and wireline telecom carriers to curb pretexting, which made national headlines in the Hewlett-Packard Co. spying scandal two years ago. One of the companies implicated in the HP imbroglio – Action Research Group Inc. – is among the parties shut down by the FTC in its latest pretexting case.