"This Isn't for Any More": A Magazine Telemarketing CEO Pleads Guilty

This one was built to lie.

What happened?

On July 20, 2020, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota, part of the Department of Justice (DOJ), announced that Wayne Robert Dahl, Jr., 51, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud before Chief Judge John R. Tunheim in Minneapolis.

Dahl was the owner and CEO of Your Magazine Service, Inc., a telemarketing company with a call center in Chaska, Minnesota. According to his plea and court documents, the company tricked mostly elderly consumers into signing up for costly magazine subscriptions.

How the scam worked

According to the plea and court filings:

• Dahl bought lists of people with active magazine subscriptions through other companies.
• He had employees cold-call those people and falsely say they were calling to offer a $150 reduction on their existing account balance. The consumers didn't have accounts with his company.
• Employees got credit card information by falsely claiming they were doing a survey on credit card and banking use.
• That information was used to sign people up for packages they didn't want or didn't realize they were buying.
• The packages billed 20 monthly payments of $49.90. That's $998 total.

And then there was the "rebuttal script." If a consumer said they didn't want more magazines, employees were told to say: "Oh, this isn't for any more. This is for what you're already getting."

More than 13,000 people bought these packages. Dahl and his company took in more than $11 million.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated, with help from the Minnesota Attorney General's Office.

Here's the thing ...

Rebuttals aren't evil. Every sales team has them. A good rebuttal answers a real question with a true answer.

A rebuttal that says "this isn't a new purchase" when it's a new $998 purchase? That's the whole fraud in one sentence. Read that again. And someone wrote it down. And handed it out. And now it's in a federal plea.

Write every script like a prosecutor will read it. Because one might.

What to do this week

• Read your rebuttal scripts out loud. Is every word true?
• Never pretend to be a company the consumer already does business with.
• Never collect card numbers under the cover of a "survey."
• Confirm the total price clearly before any sale closes.

Honest scripts close too. They just close better customers.