Attorney General reaches settlement with “lead list” provider TMOne LLC

DES MOINES - An Iowa City-based company has agreed to pay the state $2,500 and do a better job of screening its clients under a settlement with the Iowa Consumer Protection Division.

The settlement calls for TMone LLC to review its clients' marketing plans and refuse to provide lead lists if the plans appear to involve consumer fraud.

According to the Attorney General's Office, which oversees the Consumer Protection Division, the case stems from a 91-year-old Eastern Iowa woman who received an onslaught of fraudulent mailings, including prize schemes and personalized appeals from supposed psychics.

The woman's family reported she was going broke from responding to the mailings.

'The fact that so many predatory mail operations could zero in on this one vulnerable woman made it clear that sophisticated coordination was occurring,” Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said in a news release. 'The buying and selling of target lists through list brokers appeared to be key.”

The Consumer Protection Division attempted to determine whether there were list brokers that would sell lead lists even with clear evidence that consumers would be targeted by con artists.

Earlier this year, according to the Attorney General's Office, an investigator located a list clearinghouse website and posed as someone looking for a list of Iowans age '55 to 100” to target in a mail campaign. TMone indicated a willingness to help.

The investigator disclosed to a TMone salesman that the plan was to send 5,000 'retirement age” Iowans a personalized letter from a psychic describing a recent 'vision” in which the recipient could be seen winning a multimillion dollar jackpot on a specific calendar date in the near future, according to the Attorney General's Office. The investigator also disclosed that the supposed psychic would be fictitious, that the vision was bogus, that other claims in the letter were fabricated, and that the whole point was to see how much the retirees would pay when 'the jackpot theme is hammered home.”

Despite the red flags that Iowans would be targeted for what Miller called a 'blatantly fraudulent mailing,” the TMone representative was willing to sell a list of 5,000 Iowa residents age 65 and older with the 'highest available” income, according to the news release.

'When this sting was brought to the company's attention, TMone was cooperative in providing information and committing to changes,” Miller said in the statement. 'We commend them for that. But we are concerned that this sort of willingness to sell lists even in highly suspicious circumstances may be commonplace.”

In the settlement agreement, TMone denied wrongdoing, but agreed to adopt reforms and pay $2,500 for future consumer protection enforcement efforts.

On Oct. 1, Marlowe Companies Inc. (MCI LC), of Iowa City acquired TMone from Enhanced Resource Centers, of Jacksonville, Fla., and renamed the company Mass Markets.