Reloading and Recovery Rooms

Telemarketers boast about their ability to "reload" consumers, borrowing a term from target practice to describe their tactic of barraging previous fraud victims with multiple sales pitches. Having scammed consumers out of money for fraudulent prize promotions and other schemes, these con artists place consumers' names on "sucker lists." Then they "reload" by targeting the same consumers with promises of even bigger prizes, letting the consumers believe they will make back the money they have already lost to fraud. In the mid-1990s, scam artists also bought sucker lists for recovery room schemes, in which more fraud promoters promised to help consumers recover their losses for a fee. Since the fall of 1994, the FTC has brought seven cases against these kinds of entities,(6) many of which brazenly concentrate their business practices on older Americans.(7)