While it may seem like ink and toner sellers such as HP toner are keeping up a great scam every time they sell you a cartridge, the fact is that there are serious office supply schemes going down all the time and no company with a phone number is safe. Prevention is the best bet when dealing with these con artists, and to prevent falling victim it is most important to know what types of toner scams are out there, to understand them, and to have basic guidelines about information privacy which your secretarial staff follow on a daily basis.
But first, why is toner so often the trigger point for scam artists the world over? Since the seventies con artists and scammers have been milking thousands of dollars from legitimate companies taking advantage of the universality of printer toner, the value of the cartridges, and there quick replacement rate. These details make them perfect for scams since everyone uses printers, there is real money tied up in them, and with the rapidity of toner resupply and shuffling many times the scam is lost in the shuffle giving them a quiet lifeblood. And every time a scam works it only opens the door and funds another scam behind it.
The most common and oldest form of toner con is the classic ‘toner phoner.’ In this scam a secretary is cold called by a scammer, usually one with a pleasant and businesslike phone voice. This call begins with a greeting and then attempts, by various scripts, to get the secretary to reveal information. Often the caller will pretend to be the normal toner supplier with a question about the company’s printer or maintenance. Other times they may be pretending to take a survey. In the end, however, these con artists are after two pieces of information: the name of the person in charge of ordering for the targeted company, and the type of printers used.
It is unfortunately clever. This information lets them know what name to put on a fake invoice and what toner cartridges to ship to the company. A scam where they sent an invoice by itself may work every once in a while, but most people like to compare what they have to what is being charged. By sending actual ink and toner products that work for the printer the victim company owns and uses these scammers increase the odds tremendously that the follow up invoice will be paid without contest. And if it is contested, these toner sellers are masters of bullying, claiming that they sent the product and that the victim company has a moral obligation to pay them. This is absolutely not true, as the law states that unsolicited product shipped to a person or company is a gift—and should not be paid for. It is especially untrue when you realize that the prices these toner phoners charge are tremendously greater than they should be and the product itself is low quality and may actually damage the printers it is used upon.
A second, similar scam begins with a free trial offer over the phone of some new amazing type of ink or toner, so long as you let them know whether you use HP ink cartridges or Lexmark model such and such. The secretary, of course, sees an opportunity to try out some new ink and save product costs. The toner arrives shortly thereafter and it may or may not prove to be decent or even great stuff. The problem is in the non-existent fine print. The scammers follow up with a bill claiming that the free trial was contingent on the product being returned, unopened, by a certain point or some other garbage that goes against the very idea of a free trial and was never mentioned. However, bullying and empty threats are often enough to convince many fed up or frightened individuals to sell out to the scammers—and the game goes on.
For these scams prevention is everything. Never give out or allow your employees to give out information regarding the hardware you use or other data points such as manger names or order mangers, which can be used to fill out a phony invoice. Also make sure that everyone is familiar with your regular suppliers, as this will allow them to recognize interlopers. Information security is everything in the modern world, even when facing a forty year old family of toner scams.