“Regulators have been completely ineffective in their civil fines and forfeitures for these scams. It’s like whack-a-mole, by the time you shut one down another is popping up. The only way to stop it is to criminally charge the operators for mail and wire fraud, force a prosecution, and send them to prison for a very long time” says a former employee of the FTC whom asked to remain anonymous.
The simple rebranding and acquisitions of new merchant accounts provides a continuous lifeline to free trial operators. John Monarch’s competitor, Hashtag Fulfillment (now rebranded as iShip), recently found itself in hot water for their free trial clients continuous rebranding and relaunch of free trials that were losing their MIDs due to consumer complaints:
Consumer Justice Investigative Reporter Cristin Severance uncovered that trial scams use non-descript names in order to make it hard to trace complaints online.
At the end of this article we have provided links to a long list of free trials that link back to Monarch’s Direct Outbound Services headquarters in Greenville, South Carolina.
