The Ohio Attorney General announced Friday that he had brought suit against a Columbus OH-based check processor for helping Canadian telemarketers defraud residents of the state.
Attorney General James Petro said a lawsuit was filed against the owner of Integrated Check Technologies for giving “substantial support” to at least 57 telemarketing company clients in cases the companies should have flagged as fraud.
The suit charges Integrated and a subsidiary, Check Free Recovery, with assisting and facilitating deceptive telemarketing acts, processing bank debits on behalf of phone solicitors who were not registered and bonded and did not comply with solicitation laws, and processing unauthorized bank debits. It asks for injunctions against the defendants, civil penalties of $25,000 for each consumer law violation and $11,000 for each telemarketing sales rule violation, and restitution to all affected Ohio consumers.
According to Petro, Integrated took personal bank-account information acquired by the telemarketers and used that data to withdraw money from consumer accounts and often made withdrawals without consumers’ authorization or even knowledge. Petro added that even authorized withdrawals were illegal if they were based on deceptive telemarketing sales pitches.
The company should have realized the illegality of the sales pitches used by the telemarketers, 37 of whom are located in the Montreal area, because Integrated had copies of the scripts for those pitches in its possession, Petro said. He added that they clearly violated federal and state consumer protection laws by masked the sellers’ identities and misrepresenting goods and services being sold, among other violations.
