I just got this in the snail mail, a very official looking bill from
EMV compliance
PO Box 340380
Dept. 95197
Columbus, OH 43234-0380
It is addressed to me in my professional capacity, at my place of work. It’s using a variant of my address used by a lot of the throwaway med journals I get. It informs me I owe them $139.50 for my Annual EMV Terminal Download, EMV Smart Card Compatible, with a $25,000 customer liability included. It provides account numbers and reference numbers. It also has harsh language, printed in red, about what happens with late fees if you don’t pay by the due date.
It provides no phone numbers to call, and provides a website at www.evmcompliance.com to visit. Visiting this website reveals a minimally informative webpage with equally minimal links, all of which discuss the legitimate role of EMV and credit card fraud in suitably vague terms.
Anybody else seeing this scam? Some cursory googling did not reveal scam info for me, but there’s no way in hell I ever ordered this service or arranged for any smart card use by my patients!
The fines are/can be awfully steep if you go awry of this, however, I’m guessing that they’re just playing up on fear and/or getting people to think it’s an official letter that they have to abide by. No different than the ones from “Personnel Concepts” that tell you if you don’t give them an ungodly amount of money, right now, you’ll owe thousands in fines for not having the correct labor law posters. It’s just a private company using scare tactics to get money from people.
I got a different one a few years back. I got a letter from the state to renew my sellers permit (or one of my licenses). I was this close to paying it when I noticed the “pay to” name wasn’t in my computer. Some digging showed that A)I already renewed it a few weeks ago B)the letter wasn’t from the state, just a company that happened to use the word “State” or “Wisconsin” in their name and C)it wasn’t even for a license, they were going to charge me to get a copy of my license printed or framed or mounted or something, but they worded in such a way that it looked very official and required and not at all like I was about to buy a picture frame. That one almost got me. I did report that to the state.
I wish I could remember more of the details of it. I’ll have to dig around and see if I ever mentioned it here.
IME it’s really just called EMV when it’s a merchant talking to their processor. Other people call it ‘You have to use the chip thing’.
PS, check out the fines for not upgrading your terminal to accept cards that begin with a 2. $2500/day for the first 30 days. $10000/day for the next 60 days then $20,000 each occurrence.
I called my processor to make sure I got the upgrade (which I did) and told them I was annoyed that with fines that high I should have been provided with a way to check this for myself. Either a software version number or a test credit card number to use.
Since the scammers are based in Columbus, OH and their mail drop is near Ohio State University, we must consider the possibility that this is a sleazy attempt to raise money to pay O.S.U. football players under the table.
Some fans will stop at nothing to give the Buckeyes an unfair advantage.
My patients are the only ones whose health care is mandated in the US Constitution to be provided by the government! :eek:
[sub]Because that’s how the Supremes have interpreted the Constitution. But it’s amazing how many state legislators have asked me why we bother providing any healthcare at all for convicted felons. They tend to be surprised by that answer. [/sub]
Thanks for confirming my 99.9% certainty this bill was bo oh oh oh GUS!
You might want to send a note to the Earth Class Mail company that rents out the box. If they are a legitimate organization, they’d probably be grateful knowing their address is being used for a scam.
Sounds like there’s a good chance that the enterprising entrepreneurs behind “EMV Compliance” may end up with free federal health care themselves – they may even become Qadgop’s patients!
Aside from the typo in the domain name, the website domain is pretty much what you’d expect from a cheap fly-by-night organization: The domain resolves to an IP address owned by Cloudflare, a company which rents hosting to anyone who pays, and the WHOIS information on the domain name is just GoDaddy, a company which sells domain names and name resolution.
It’s like you got a letter from Generic Company at Generic Business Location, with absolutely no further identification. Much like how the mailing address is a drop box, in fact.
A little off topic, but I often get official-looking mail informing me that if I want to obtain a copy of my Statement of Information (a CA business filing), I MUST send $179.99 (or whatever) to X Company IMMEDIATELY. Of course, copies are obtainable at a much lower cost from the state, and you don’t HAVE to have a recent one around, though sometimes it becomes necessary. (It may be that other businesses have more frequent need of one, and they are better scam targets than me.)
