Posted on 08/17/2006 9:15:23 PM PDT by idsujmxzcg
BAY CITY -- Lawyers for three Texas men once accused of plotting to blow up the Mackinac Bridge claim the government is bailing out an overzealous prosecutor by bringing unprecedented charges.
Until Wednesday, even the FBI said the business of buying and altering cell phones -- as the men claim was their only motive -- was a legal enterprise, and that the only issue was whether proceeds end up in terrorist coffers.
But now, the FBI and U.S. attorneys in Bay City say the entrepreneurial behavior of three Americans of Palestinian descent amounts to fraud, not terrorism.
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(Excerpt) Read more at mlive.com ...
I agree that it may be a theory that some believe, but almost everything sells on ebay higher than what a person could buy at walmart or Frys.
Last year George Foreman grills could be bought up on sale at retailers and then resold at a 50% markup.
The guy's theory doesn't seem to be well thought out as he explain how unopened hard drives still sell for what some retailers are selling them for.
See my post #99.
Note to self: Next time Fry's has a hard drive sale, buy a bunch & put 'em up on eBay with this description: "You are bidding on a used hard drive from my home computer that I used for web surfing, email, Quicken, etc. You know, the usual stuff. It's served me well, and I never lost any of my precious data. But now I've traded up to a bigger drive..."
:-)
Most of the people doing the buying probably have no idea what the buyer's intentions are and may think they are doing no harm since the only entity getting ripped is a big corporation. One thing they all know, even if what they do may yet not be expressly illegal, is that they are screwing somebody, even if that somebody is a corporation.
This isn't an 'innocent business.' The ones who are just selling to Joe Sixpack and not to some terrorist's middlemen are still buying a company's product, modifying it, and then selling that product as if it is new, using that company's 'good name'. If the phone malfunctions- perhaps due to the quality of the modification- the consumer may call the original manufacturer and eat up time and thus money complaining to customer service about the product, because they assume that company is responsible for it, and not the A'hole who modified it. So the manufacturer's plan of selling the product below their cost to better compete, intending to make up for the loss on the sales of minutes is short-circuited- they never get their investment back.
That's fraud- false advertisement- the end user is under the impression that it's a new Tracphone - it's labeled as such after all- but it's no longer what it is labeled. It's some generic chopped phone with some parts of unknown quality from who knows where, assembled and reprogrammed by someone who may or may not take care to do the work correctly, and sold by someone who won't be liable for the product if somehow the hijacked product becomes a centerpeice in someone's class-action lawsuit. In the right venue the legit manufacturer could still lose since the company has deep pockets and juries can be fickle.
The bogus cell phone company doing the selling is mooching off another company, "making" a product which he evades having to comply with all the regulations that the real original manufacturer did- he gets all the benefit of being a phone "manufacturer" with none of the risks, none of the licensing and other government fees, and few of the costs of assembly workers and component parts.
It is annoying that phone companies, printer companies and others engage in below-cost sales incentives where the loss is recovered by tacking it onto refill minutes or the cartridges, etc - at least you can still assume the product was made according to that company's standards and reputation, and use that reputation to assess which product will be the better one. You know if there's a problem they will deal with it with you because they need to uphold their reputation. But what I hate more than those enticing below-cost sales tactics are people who take advantage of another's hard work, who know what the deal is and then renege on it. Modifying the product to bypass the deal- the agreement to buy airtime implicit in that it's a product designed to work on one network- is reneging on the deal. It's fraud. It's unethical yet they are proud enough to defend it.
In addition, a company that has a good reputation for workmanship is going to be harmed when people modify their products and then sell them under that same name, using the good reputation of the makers to profit at the legal manufacturer's expense. The altered product may fail and make people reluctant to legitimately purchase other things the original manufacturer makes, or tell others that his name-brand phone or other product was defective, and can unjustly ruin the company's reputation.
(Not that having your product be preferred by four out of five professional terrorists is a desireable reputation.)
It's like apples and oranges... while cell phone locks may be thought of as "secret handshakes," in function, they are designed not to be replaced by the consumer but to be an integral part of the machine. Printer cartridges are intended to be replaced.
The printer cartridge manufacturers also aren't selling their cartridges as "Lexmark" printer cartridges nor are they selling the printer. They are selling the accessories as generic products you add to the machine, not unlike you would add paper. The printer cartridge is designed to work in spite of the machine's built-in limitations - it does not remove those preset limitations or physically alter the machine.
Hey Jeff. I don't believe everything is terrorist related but I also don't want to bury my head in the sand. I don't know what is going on here. If that is hysterical...shrug. I have concerns there was more to this and just think that we should watch them closely.
Receipts are not books and they do not indicate whether he ever paid taxes on his earnings.
Do you pay taxes?
Someone PLEASE tell me why an "unlocked" cell phone makes sense. I don't get it. I've read about it but don't understand it any better than I did before. I guess I'm just dense.
"Do you pay taxes?"
More than most.
What advantage is there to my using another service than Tracfone's? How would that work exactly?
So you are OK with these guys not paying them?
On a fringe business like this, I don't really care. If you add up all of their expenses and how many ways they split the proceeds each is probably only making about $5,000 a year tops.
If paying taxes on reselling something really bothers you this much then you really should check out ebay and send emails to each of its sellers to make sure they aren't doing anything illegal.
Also, you could cruise the yardsales and make sure they are keeping proper books.
In the case of unlocking prepaid phones and reselling them it's BECAUSE it's been altered (unlocked) that people are willing to pay a premium for it. People certainly aren't under the impression that it's an unaltered phone (or they wouldn't be paying extra for them).
I thought I was the only one thinking about that one!
Could the FBI be so stupid as to miss that? Something stinks to high heaven about all these "coincedental" mass cell phone purchases. It ain't anywhere near a legitimate business enterprise.
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