By late 1995, fraudulent telemarketers were offering to acquire FCC paging licenses for consumers for hefty prices, claiming to put consumers in control of the airwaves so that paging companies would lease or buy the rights to use airwaves from them. Fraud promoters told consumers they could boost their previous "investments" by acquiring new, purportedly profitable, paging licenses. These scam artists published success stories of real investors in these fields to tout fraudulent offerings. Indeed, many defendants in FTC law enforcement actions simply hyped the information superhighway as the primary reason to invest in such offerings. These high-tech investment frauds alone cost consumers millions of dollars--almost 15 percent of all consumer losses reported in the FTC/NAAG Telemarketing Complaint System by December 31, 1996. In recent years, both the FTC and the SEC have brought many individual enforcement actions involving these high-tech investments.

FTC Actions