NET USERS PHONE FOR `FREE' PORN, GET TOLL CHARGES FROM MOLDOVA.Byline: The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times In what authorities describe as a fraudulent new high-technology scheme, telephone and Internet marketers are joining with telecommunications companies in emerging nations to bilk bilk tr.v. bilked, bilk·ing, bilks 1. a. To defraud, cheat, or swindle: made millions bilking wealthy clients on art sales. b. unsuspecting consumers around the world. The latest operation, uncovered by federal regulators and American phone company investigators this month, enticed on-line computer browsers with a promise of free pornography and then subjected users to exorbitant telephone charges billed from a number in Moldova, the former Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic or Moldavia: see Moldova. . A federal judge in New York shut down the operation, allegedly run by three Long Island residents, after the Federal Trade Commission accused the defendants of running ``one of the most insidious scams'' the agency had ever seen. Officials said they expected such schemes to proliferate as sophisticated World Wide Web site operators employ the growing telephone systems of underdeveloped un·der·de·vel·oped adj. Not adequately or normally developed; immature. nations to defraud To make a Misrepresentation of an existing material fact, knowing it to be false or making it recklessly without regard to whether it is true or false, intending for someone to rely on the misrepresentation and under circumstances in which such person does rely on it to his or naive Internet users. |
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