Boiler rooms have your private information and they’ll use it against you

THEY’RE the latest underworld industry: criminal call centres where sports fans are pressured into buying software to help them win big. You won’t know you’re a victim until it’s too late.

THEY are small, well-run, professional operations with a handful of dedicated staff who know to do their jobs well.

But these aren’t the Australians that Tony Abbott wants to “have a go” and contribute to the economy. These so called “boiler rooms” exist only to take your money.

Boiler rooms are essentially high-pressure sales offices that use telemarketers who work from a carefully prepared script to trap people into paying thousands of dollars.

The ABC’s 7.30 program has revealed Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) was investigating several boiler rooms operating on the Gold Coast that may have been protected by corrupt former cops.

But they aren’t the only ones, and an Australian expert has told news.com.au that millions of Australians were putting themselves at risk from these con artists. Without even realising it.

Warren Day, the senior assessment and intelligence executive at ASIC, said a lot of work had gone into uncovering what was fuelling the boiler rooms.

“The real question is how do they know how to target. A lot of effort has been done to try and work that out. We do know people who put their names down on mailing lists and competitions, if you’re in shopping centre for example, or fill in a survey where you’re in the running to get an iPad, or if you say, ‘Yes I’d like to be marketed to about financial service, or buy tickets online’. If you do all of this your name goes into a marketing database,” Mr Day said.

The Australian Crime Commission had determined those databases could be sold and eventually “end up in hands of these scammers”.

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The result is a professional call at 6pm from an unknown person offering something too good to be true.

Because it is.

“The secret to their success is they say we’re not looking from a lot from you ... Once you see it you’ll be interested and want to contribute.”

Thousands of dollars changed hands and by the time people woke up to what was going on it was too late.

They sometimes struck again, pretending to be lawyers also asking for money to join a class action against the scammers.

Mr Day said the name boiler rooms came from the term sweat factory, where “they put all these people in a room that’s too hot and they make them make lots and lots of phone calls”.

The reality was quite different.

“The ones that have been caught red-handed, they are far from it, they are very small offices turning out of a very nondescript office. They appear professional and look after their people very well. This is their job and they’re good at it.”

The people who made the calls knew what “emotional levers to pull”.

“They understand how to con people. They understand the psychology of people and take advantage of that,” Mr Day said.

The Australian-based boiler rooms were mainly aimed at betting software and other things similar to gambling on stock exchanges, Mr Day said.

A number had been busted on the Gold Coast but there were always more springing up.

“They’re always there. The best we can do is disrupt them but it’s very hard to catch them and prosecute them. The best thing we can do is make it difficult to continue to operate and move them on somewhere and move them on somewhere.”

This month, Queensland police shut down two boiler rooms operating on the Gold Coast and arrested a 54-year-old man linked to a separate boiler room operation which took $466,000 from 19 investors.

It operated between January 2008 and April 2012 and used a “sophisticated internet betting system” to scam victims from Queensland, NSW and the Northern Territory.

Detective Superintendent Brian Hay said the Gold Coast had sadly become a “mecca” for boiler rooms which he labelled “criminal call centres”.

Originally published as Boiler rooms have your private information and they’ll use it against you