Sounds like a troll for a class action lawsuit.
What you have to understand is that even the bottom feeders have bottom feeders. Consider the following purely hypothetical situation:
A law firm (lets call them MBF, for Master Bottom Feeders), specializes in class action lawsuits. You know -- the kind where they collect millions of dollars for themselves and the claimants get a coupon for a free hamburger.
MBF scours the medical journals and comes across a paper that suggests that people who ingest too much dihydrogen monoxide die at a higher rate that regular people.
MBF puts out the word to the thousands of LBFs (Local Bottom Feeders): "Find us people who have ingested dihydrogen monoxide!" and offers a referal bounty for every candidate that meets the criteria for the class.
Hence you get all the LBFs putting up billboards, running radio and TV ads, and making mass telephone calls such as the one above.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: A very good point you raise is how little the actual 'victims' get in class action lawsuits. Here is an example involving a well known restaurant chain, McDonalds, in the Chicago area.First, some background: In Chicago, at least, maybe elsewhere, there are McDonalds restaurants _everywhere_, every few blocks it seems. In a couple instances, there are two on the same block (State/Dearborn and Randolph Streets in Chicago). A McDonalds on one corner with a Burger King right across the street, then a half block further west, in the old Greyhound Station another McDonalds. Ditto on the north side, State Street and Chicago Avenue. Burger King and McDonalds right next door to each other, then a block east at Rush Street a McDonalds and a Jack-in-the-Box. Second, all the McDonalds are independently owned and operated, but a 'support group' run by the owner/operators services them all for technical needs. The 'Chicagoland McDonalds Operator's Association' runs a central warehouse for their supplies, their foodstuffs, their cash register repairs, etc.
Next point: What is termed 'Chicago' has, in addition to Chicago itself, a hundred plus smaller suburbs, and when you get out in the western area, the suburbs are a few blocks apart, almost as frequent as the McDonalds restaurants. Each of the suburbs has its own idea on what 'sales tax' should be for ready to eat food, groceries, other stuff. Since there are many McDonalds employees with only a simple education, not including much arithmetic skills, McDonalds' cash registers all have pictures and words on the keys. Customer wants the double cheesebuger special, clerk presses the key with that on it; the cash register calculates the total due, _includng the tax_ and prints out the amount of money expected. Trouble is, the _sales tax_. One Extra Value Meal in Chicago may cost two dollars, in Skokie it may cost $1.98 or in Morton Grove $2.05.
When a cash register goes out of order, the manager calls to the 'central services' and orders a new, refurbished cash register. Later that day a new register arrives, central services workers bring it in and install it. Theoretically, cash registers from one taxing jurisdiction are to stay in that jurisdiction. In actual practice, they go anywhere. So you pay $2.00 for your Extra Value Meal today, come in tomorrow for another of the same and $2.06 or whatever is demanded instead. You can inquire all you like about the difference in price between yesterday and today, or one register out of three or four in the same restaurant, the clerk just looks at you with a blank look on their face.
Anyway, about ten or twelve years ago, the McDonalds in Skokie, IL (which is known not only as the second or third McDonalds in existence, having been started orginally as a 'company location' when it started in 1958) is one of the most ill-managed in the chain, wound up being the defendant in a class action suit based on their poorly programmed cash registers. (Walmart has the same situation; a cash register used today in Illinois may be used next week [following its repair, etc in Kansas or Oklahoma]; proper sales tax rate is of no concern to those folks.) Plaintiff's class action lawyers said they were frequently overcharged on taxes, and it is true that if you as a shopkeeper make a claim that 'X amount of money is for taxes' when in fact the tax is either (1) incorrectly stated or (2) does not exist at all, a crime has been committed. The class action lawsuit went on a couple years, the attornies raked in piles of money; it was finally settled by McDonalds putting a newspaper ad in several Chicago-area publications with a coupon to clip out, offering a free small size drink to the holder of the coupon, to cure the problem of being charged a couple pennies too much on tax. PAT]