TONER PHONERS SCAMMING IN TEXAS

[Anonymous]

Texas businesses targeted by fraudulent invoice scams
Nothing seemed strange about a Xerox box of toner that arrived last year at the Adams and Boswell law office.
That was until the Beaumont law firm received a $650 invoice for the product from a company with a California address – Toner Express. Adams and Boswell’s Xerox supplier is based in Dallas.”We refused to pay the invoice,” operations manager Jeff Purcell said. “We started getting phone calls from people who said they were from Xerox and they were very unprofessional – you could tell they didn’t work for Xerox.”Paco Felici, a spokesman from the state Attorney General’s office said scam artists sometimes send fraudulent invoices to companies hoping the accounts payable department will fail to confirm a purchase was made and pay the bill.In the last few years, Felici said the attorney general’s office has received 20 formal written complaints of similar scams. They also receive numerous calls alerting the office of unwanted solicitations.”It’s a long-ranging type of scam,” Felici said. “In the past it used to involve primarily paper products and in recent years it’s switched to pricier supplies like photocopier toner and inkjet cartridges.”

Texas law states that businesses that receive unordered merchandise are under no obligation to pay to return the unwanted product. It can be considered a gift, according to the news release. The retailer that sent the merchandise can pay to retrieve it, but seldom do.Purcell said Adams and Boswell’s chief shareholder, Kent Adams, sent Toner Express a letter stating that, and the law firm never heard from the company again.The Enterprise placed several calls on Thursday to the number the Attorney General provided for Toner Express. The phone rang multiple times with no answer and no voicemail picked up.

[Author]

November 20, 2007 at 3:09 PM