FTC

BULLETIN: (UPDATED 11:27 A.M. EDT (U.S.A.) The Federal Trade Commission has lowered the boom on Clean Credit Report Services Inc. of Florida and three individuals associated with the firm. In a settlement from a case brought in October 2008, the FTC has obtained a judgment of $14.4 million. The defendants must surrender their assets, including [...]

UPDATED 4:56 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) Calling the operations of Arizona-based Central Coast Nutraceuticals Inc. (CCN) and affiliated companies a “$30 million” scam in 2009 alone, the Federal Trade Commission has obtained a court-ordered asset freeze in an acai-berry fraud case. Charged along with CCN were Graham D. Gibson, Michael A. McKenzy and four companies that [...]

In 2009, Oprah Winfrey sued more than 40 companies for trademark infringement amid claims they were fleecing the public by implying she endorsed their Acai berry products. Winfrey, an American television and business icon, is based in Chicago. Harpo Productions, which produces The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Dr. Oz Show, filed the infringement lawsuit [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Some readers will recall that one of the Secret Service’s allegations in the AdSurfDaily Ponzi case is that pitchmen tried to sanitize the scheme by making false claims that ASD President Andy Bowdoin had received an award for business acumen from President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. Others will recall [...]

Thousands of U.S. consumers, businesses and nonprofits were tricked into paying “bogus bills” for the renewal of their website domains by “con artists” in Canada, the FTC said. A federal judge now has issued judgments of more than $4.2 million against the accused scammers. In the cases of three defendants, the judgment was suspended based [...]

A multilevel-marketing (MLM) company that positioned itself as a firm that collected data that could be used by law enforcement and the AMBER Alert program to rescue abducted children — and later declared itself the world champion of cell-phone pricing — may be entering the foreclosure-rescue and real-estate businesses, members said. News about the purported [...]

PP BLOG BULLETIN >>> MOVING >>> More than 1.3 million debit or credit-card numbers have been compromised in an international micro-payments scheme that resulted in fraudulent charges totaling more than $10 million. The money appears to have been whisked offshore to bank accounts in Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Kyrgyzstan, the FTC said. At [...]

BULLETIN: UPDATED 1:10 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) At least 1,215 criminal defendants have been named in “Operation Stolen Dreams,” which U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder described as a “three and a half month takedown of mortgage fraud schemes throughout the country.” The mortgage-fraud operation began March 1 and is the largest-such undertaking in U.S. history, Holder [...]

The FTC and Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum have charged a Florida company that “touted a phony cure for alcoholism” with false advertising claims, false efficacy claims, false privacy claims, false claims about professional qualifications, unauthorized billing and deceptive trade practices. Among the allegations in a civil lawsuit against Alcoholism Cure Corp. were that it [...]

A Florida man who operated a previous scam has been banned for life from the telemarketing business after state and federal authorities and the Better Business Bureau worked together to expose the operation, the Federal Trade Commission said. “The FTC received invaluable assistance in this matter from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the University of [...]

UPDATED 1:04 P.M. EDT (U.S.A.) In yet another case that portends disaster for the so-called “autosurf” industry, a federal judge has ordered the Noobing autosurf to be added as a receivership defendant in a fraud case brought against its parent company. The FTC and attorneys general from Minnesota, North Carolina and Kansas brought the case [...]

The court-appointed receiver in the fraud case against the parent company of the Noobing autosurf has asked a federal judge for the authority to add Noobing to the receivership probe. Larry Cook, the receiver, said that Noobing and 14 other companies under the Affiliate Strategies Inc. (ASI) umbrella have become the subjects of “numerous inquiries” [...]

Saying it has identified nearly 100 organizations that lost control of personal information they maintain on employees, customers or others, the FTC has notified the entities to tighten security on peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing networks. At the same time, the agency said it has opened “non-public investigations” of companies whose customer or employee information has been [...]

UPDATED 9:47 A.M. ET (U.S.A.) Coincidence? Part of the new partnership the FTC announced yesterday with Craigslist that urges consumers to be on the lookout for scams when responding to job and business opportunity ads online? Messages urging caution are appearing in Craigslist ads for NarcThatCar, the Dallas-based company that says it is building a [...]

An inmate operated a collect-call “cramming” scheme from a Florida state prison by hiding his ownership of three firms, federal prosecutors said. Willoughby Farr, 46, of West Palm Beach, has been indicted on six counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud. He faces a maximum prison sentence of 160 years, if convicted [...]

The Federal Trade Commission has announced a major sweep involving numerous companies and defendants — and a new partnership with Craigslist, Microsoft, Monster.com and CareerBuilder to combat employment and work-at-home fraud. Meanwhile, the agency said it was working with AARP’s Legal Counsel for the Elderly to keep America’s senior citizens’ pocketbooks out of the clutches [...]

Still pushing work-at-home schemes on the Internet? The Federal Trade Commission has a message for you. On Wednesday, the FTC will announce a major “law enforcement sweep cracking down on job and work-at-home fraud fueled by the economic downturn,” the agency said. Investigators will release “[s]till shots from the Web sites of some of the [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Recidivism, the tendency to continue committing crimes or breaking laws even after getting caught and perhaps even going to prison, is a common theme in the scam universe. It has been an element in many recent cases we’ve written about, including the AdSurfDaily Ponzi scheme case (principals Andy Bowdoin and Clarence Busby had [...]

A court-appointed receiver has described the accounting records of Affiliate Strategies Inc. (ASI) as a mess, saying “an opinion on the accuracy of these records is not possible without an extensive audit that would require significant additional costs.” ASI is the parent company of the Noobing autosurf, which targeted deaf people in sales promotions. ASI [...]