Mortgage companies buying leads ARE liable
It gets really old to have the brokers whine that they didn’t know about the faxes. And 99% of the times they knew exactly what was going on.
I was actually looking for something else, but ran across this real interesting excerpt from the Junkfax.org Q & A:
“Q. The mortgage company says they aren’t guilty...they just buy leads. They don’t know how they are generated.
A. They know because they signed a contract with fax.com in advance, before they got the leads. Say there are 100 companies signing up for leads. Then fax.com sends out a “generic” fax and qualifies the person who calls. The lead is transferred to the company with the best fit based on qualifying questions (or on a random basis depending on how many leads they contracted for).
Here’s what I wrote to Bridge Capital’s attorney:
For the benefit of your client, I’d recommend you discuss the meaning of agency law. Your client ratifies the acts of his agent by buying leads that were generated by junk faxes.
If you client wishes to not to be sued in the future, they should acqure leads that were legally generated. If and when you client decides to do that, please let me know and as a professional courtesy, I will let the FCC and other interested parties know.
Until then, I believe your client can be held liable for ANY unsolicited mortgage faxes sent by “fax.com” since liability is joint and several.
In other words, if 100 advertisers buy leads from Live Leads Corp. aka “fax.com”, and fax.com sends out 1 fax, then the sender of that one fax is arguably the group of 100 advertisers, rather than the advertiser that actually gets the referral on the call. This is because the sender must be determinable at the time the fax was sent, rather than after the damage is done.
This lack of knowledge about what is going on is known as “the Sergeant Schultz Defense” which is the successor the Duck Test. Here’s the citation:
No matter how many times this Court reviews the factual essence of this case, one cannot resist a comparison between the Defendants’ professed ignorance of unlawful conduct, and perhaps the most memorable refrain of Hogan’s Heroes, a popular television situation comedy of the 1960’s. For those too young to remember, each episode featured a scene in which Sergeant Schultz, always unmindful of the clandestine activities of the irrepressible Colonel Hogan and his men, would be found to explain away his incompetence to his superior, the irascible Colonel Klink, by saying, “I know n-oth-i-n-g, I see n-oth-i-n-g, I do n-oth-i-n-g.”
This dialogue, which each week delighted television viewers across the country, somehow resurfaced once again, this time in my courtroom.
Ortho Pharmaceutical Corp. v. Sona Distributors, Inc., 663 F. Supp 64, 66
n.1 (S.D. Fl. 1987).”
Too funny!
It seems like every time I look at this page it got longer and I find new great stuff.
Comments:
*** Absolutely NO SPAM! A $50 handling and removal fee applies to each advertisement and occasionally I feature an advertised site as the scam it is.
Due to abuse, comments are moderated and are usually posted within a day. Registration is NOT required to post.
Only constructive comments are approved. I DELETE comments containing only dribble and a link to some commercial site.
This is NOT a graffiti wall and you may exercise your FREE SPEECH at YOUR site.
Contact info - credit reporting & scoring - legislative efforts