FTC lists 2007's top consumer frauds
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Internet still a den of thieves For the seventh year in a row, identity theft is the number one complaint reported to the US Federal Trade Commission.â¦
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Customers of several popular online retailers, including Fandango.com, Priceline.com , and Staples.com, were victims of an alleged Internet scheme in which their credit cards were charged a monthly fee for a ``discount club" membership they had never requested, according to a class action lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court in Massachusetts.
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Internet identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in the U.S. today. For five straight years, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ranked it as one of the most-reported types of fraud. Despite the increasing awareness of identity theft among consumers and financial institutions, the identity-theft racket shows no signs of slowing. Reported losses from identity theft, currently responsible for over 40 percent of all fraud complaints, approached nearly $300 million last year.
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Scammers are sending out virus-laden e-mails claiming to have information on complaints filed with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, the FTC warned Monday.The e-mail appears to come from frauddep@ftc.gov -- a spoofed address -- and it includes a malicious attachment that downloads keylogging software, which is used to steal sensitive information such as passwords and account numbers.&quot;While the e-mail includes the FTC seal, it has grammatical errors, misspellings, and incorrect syntax,&quot; the FTC said in an alert , released Monday. &quot;Recipients should forward the e-mail to spam@uce.gov and then delete it.&quot; E-mail sent to this uce.gov address goes into the FTC&#39;s spam database, which is used by investigators.Online scammers often masquerade as government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service in the hopes of tricking unsuspecting victims into clicking on attachments or visiting malicious Web sites.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has asked a federal court to require an alleged Web page hijacking operation to obey previous orders barring unfair and deceptive practices.Walter Rines, business partner Sanford Wallace, and Rines&#39; company, Online Turbo Merchant, diverted users of MySpace.com to other Web sites and barraged them with ads to earn advertising commissions, according to court papers filed with the FTC. The defendants used pagejacking, phishing, and other methods to target MySpace users in violation of a previous court order, the FTC said in a news release.The FTC, in a Jan. 23 filing, asked the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire to order the defendants to give up the money they earned from their MySpace scheme.Rines&#39; listed phone number in New Hampshire was disconnected.In October 2005, the FTC charged Odysseus Marketing and its owner, Rines, with luring consumers to their Web site by offering free software, including a program that supposedly allowed them to engage in anonymous peer-to-peer file sharing. The software was bundled with spyware that intercepted and replaced search results and barraged consumers&#39; computers with pop-up ads, the FTC said. The software also stole users&#39; personal information, and users were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the FTC said.The FTC alleged that the defendants&#39; software captured consumers&#39; personal information and transmitted the information to the defendants&#39; servers. Consumers were unable to locate or uninstall the spyware through reasonable means, the agency charged. The court ordered a preliminary halt to these practices pending trial, and in October 2006 Odysseus and Rines settled the charges by stipulating to a permanent injunction.The permanent injunction prohibited the defendants from redirecting consumers&#39; computers; from changing any Web browser&#39;s default home page; and from modifying or replacing the functions of any computer application. It required Rines and his company to obtain consumers&#39; express consent before downloading or distributing any content to their computers.The permanent injunction also imposed a $1.75 million judgment, and all but $10,000 was suspended based on the defendants&#39; inability to pay.In its recent filing, the FTC alleges that Rines, his company, and Wallace knew of the permanent injunction and violated that order by diverting users from MySpace.com to their Web sites.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed charges against a payment processing company, accusing it of attempting to debit consumers&#39; bank accounts for up to $200 million on behalf of dishonest merchants.Those consumers either never received the goods or received worthless items, said the FTC, which filed the complaint with seven other U.S. states. The payment company allegedly violated both federal and state consumer fraud laws, telemarketing rules, and FTC regulations regarding the unfair processing of payments.The payment processing company went by several names, which are listed in a FTC news release. The FTC alleges the company processed payments for fraudulent telemarketers and Internet-based merchants that used deceptive sales scripts and methods.About $69 million of the $200 million in transactions were either rejected by consumers or returned because of lack of proper payment authorization, the FTC said.The FTC wants to refund consumers and force the company to forfeit money it still holds from the fraud in addition to other civil penalties. The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.The states that have joined the suit are Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Vermont.
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Overall, the industry did several things right and wrong this year. But here's what Network World readers, columnists, bloggers and testers say are the absolute smartest and dumbest moves of 2007 -- and why they matter.
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The Federal Trade Commission said it warned more than 200 companies about âpotentially deceptiveâ mortgage advertisements.
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With phishing attacks skyrocketing, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued a consumer alert detailing ways Web surfers can avoid being fleeced by online scammers.
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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has begun mailing claim forms to more than 1,400 identity theft victims who spent money to clear up identity-theft problems due to a security breach at data broker ChoicePoint announced in early 2005.
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FTC is mailing forms to consumers who believe they were victims of identity theft.
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The FTC said it believes the companies induced computer users to buy its spyware-eradication software, sold for US$30 and bearing names such as Spy Wiper and Spy Deleter, after first infecting
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Online merchants in the United States have become better at weeding out fraudulent credit card orders, a new survey indicates. But shipping overseas remains a risky venture. By Joanna Glasner.
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FTC charges that Petco Web site left customer data exposed.
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Online consumers in the U.S. have had a million things to complain about. Literally.
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Eight businesses, seven individuals named as defendants in suit alleging distribution, sales of counterfeit programs.
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Americans lost at least $548 million  to identity theft and consumer fraud last year as the Internet  provided new victims for age-old scams, according to government  statistics released Tuesday.