Cold callers illegally sold Aussie farmers 1,700 years worth of printer ink

No fines? No prison?

Get caught breaking in, steal some beer and a TV and go to jail.

Get caught stealing tens of thousands of dollars, return some of the money, get a "buy" recommendation from an investment company.

They couldn't have been HP cartridges then, not enough zeros on the price paid.

Hmm

While I'd personally hang up on these crooks, they obviously know if they call enough people they'll find somebody who they can bully, scare, con, or otherwise pressure into buying their crap.

Same principles apply if we're talking Nigerian princes, MLMs, Kirby vacuum cleaner salesmen, pump and dump stocks, Microsoft "technical support" ringing about a virus they detected, timeshare, or some other questionable business proposition. They'll work knowing that even if only a tiny % of people respond to their activity it is still profitable. Even worse, once the scammers have found a mark they'll hit them again and again, or even trade their marks to other scammers.

So it's good to see the law give them a clobbering in return.

Who paid the fine ?

Should have been paid by the cold calling individuals - not the company. Penalise the individuals and they might change their behaviour. Penalise the company and they will see it as just another business cost - this time they got caught, plenty of other ones they did not.

This is what is needed in the banking system - but will not happen, politicians get too many lucrative consultancies once they have left office.

$44 a cartridge?

My last printer lasted 12 years and didn't use $44 of toner or other parts in all that time. And it had a replacement drum and roller for that cost too.

Damn, I miss that Samsung laser printer, but there's only so long you can keep an Intel NetPort Express (with its 386SL chip inside) running to convert the Centronics port on the printer to be a network-addressable printer.

It's replacement, which is a mono wifi laser with NFC, smartapps and all sorts, cost less than $100 in equivalent money too.

They could have bought several hundreds of modern printers for the cost of that ink.

Why they didn't just hang up.

Sometimes you just don't, even if you think you should.

I remember once in the 1990s getting a cold call from a crafty sales person offering replacement windows (the glass kind, not the Microsoft kind.) As I was just 15 at the time I really had no interest in double-hung tilt-clean glazed whatevers but the guy on the phone kept talking and moving the conversation forward and next thing I know I'm giving him directions to my house so he can come over to inspect our current windows and give an estimate to replace them.

It all got sorted when my mother found out but to this day I can't explain why I didn't just hang up on the guy. It's as close to being hypnotized as I've ever been.

I've never herd of such terrible behaviour, trying to milk them for their money like that, it show udder contempt.

It's not a new scam

It's no different from the great carbon paper scams of the 1960's. I suppose you are all too young to remember carbon paper.

is there more to this?

I mean, don't misunderstand me, cold callers are only one step above politicians, but would they reasonably be expected to know how many printers a specific farm might require?

And farmers who apparently can't afford $1/L milk at colesworths but don't notice 80K in their IT consumables budget? Weird.

Also, been a while since I looked at my map, but why is the Brisbane Times reporting on a Victorian tribunal decision about 2 Melbourne businesses?

Question

Its Australia so you you know it will be a shambles. But... How many litres of ink is that? And how toxic is that to the environment?