Computer and Web Articles

Remember United Yellow Pages and those fake Yellow Pages United invoices they sent out to millions of business owners? Remember how, though those invoices were designed to look authentic, they contained a line of print reading “This is not an invoice”? Or perhaps you, like me, even received some of these fake invoices and remember them clearly.

Apparently the company made over $425 million from 2004 – 2008 from these fake invoices and was charged with fraud in July, despite the arguments of their defense lawyers that the wording contained in those documents denied any connection to telephone companies.

What United Yellow Pages did was admittedly quite low, but the question remains: is it truly fraud if the company included “This is not an invoice” in not-so-fine-print on their not-so-real invoices?  Is it okay for businesses to make money from their efforts of blatantly tricking consumers? Or do people have the responsibility in being thorough when it comes to reading fine print?

View the story covering the fraud charges here: http://tinyurl.com/2fwqxjk or view a more detailed story including the defense attorney’s explanation of why mail fraud was not committed here: http://tinyurl.com/36kj3w9.  For the stories of business owners who lost their money to Yellow Pages United, simply Google something along the lines of “Yellow Pages United” scam (note the quotation marks around Yellow Pages United).