The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is prosecuting a Bloomingdale’s salesperson for running a month-long bogus gift card scam that netted $34,515 from the store, says the NY Sun.
It says Bloomingdale’s sales receipts were the key element of Ms. Ng’s alleged scheme.
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FTC takes heat for giving credit bureaus a special exception that allowed them to make lists of people who just filled out a loan application and sell them as leads to subprime lenders. [USA Today via U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog]
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RECALLS: Man’s Trading Company Super Magnets (aspiration, intestinal hazards), Pre-Filled Heparin Lock Flush Solution (Serratia marcescens, life-threatening injuries, death), Empire Silver Teething Rings (choking), Manttra Pressure Cookers (burn), Liberty Apparel Girls’ Hooded Sweatshirts with Drawstrings (strangulation), Lenox Covered Warmer Dishes (fire, burn).
Last weekend, T-Mobile users who sent SMS updates to their Twitter feeds found that their messages were being blocked. Naturally, tempers flared. Many customers contacted T-Mobile to complain about the problem, but T-Mobile had no answer for the sudden blockage. (It turns out it was a technical glitch on Twitter’s end.) What’s interesting is that T-Mobile’s Executive Customer Relations rep responded to one user’s complaints with a hardcore reminder that when it comes to customer rights, his pretty much begin and end with being required to pay his bill on time. Nice PR work there, T-Mobile.
My name is Marianne Maestas and I am with the Executive Customer Relations department of T-Mobile. I am contacting you on behalf of Mr. Robert Dotson in regards to the email that you sent him yesterday evening.
CNN has a hilarious article about shopping safety that you should certainly read before you hit the mall this weekend for last-minute gifts. We’re all for safety, but according to this article, letting your senior citizen wander off from the rest of the family is like like tying a fawn to a skateboard and pushing it into a den of lions: “He has to be at least 75 or 80 years old. Now, he’s a potential victim.”
A Cleveland contractor found what amounted to a $2.7 million fortune in the walls of a house he was renovating. The homeowner offered him 10%, but he wants to keep it all, his lawyers enacting a centuries old “treasure trove” common law provision. Steel boxes contained rare 1929-series Cleveland Federal Reserve bank notes, worth about $85 each, $500 bills and a $1,000 bill. Tipster Zakarth quipped, “If the contractor had found a poison leak would he take ownership of that?” What do you think?
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Apple has agreed to drop its lawsuit against Think Secret, a website that specializes in publishing in-house Apple rumors and leaks. In return, Think Secret has agreed to stop existing. However, this means the editor also gets to protect his sources. [Think Secret via Gizmodo]
Consumer Reports says that Fisher-Price has finished testing another toy blood pressure cuff and have found that it exceeds the Illinois lead limit for toys.
The companies were accused of receiving money from online gambling businesses to advertise illegal betting from 1997 through 2007.
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RECALLS: Royal Seafood Baza Inc. Dried Roach (botulism), Top Line Specialty Produc Green Paradise label” Fresh Italian basil (salmonella), Specialty Merchandise Corporation Snowman And Christmas Tree Candles (fire), DEWALT Cordless Drills (fire), Remington and McQuay “ComfortPac” Air Conditioners and Heat Pumps (fire).
Today, Congress approved a one-year postponement of the Alternative Minimum Tax, which is good news for an estimated 25 million Americans (mostly middle-class) who would have qualified for it this year. The IRS said that due to the last-minute nature of the change, some refunds may be delayed: “Changes in the tax code require substantial work, especially in reprogramming I.R.S. computers.” The IRS says that “within 72 hours it would post on its Web site revisions to a dozen forms affected by the change.”
Today the House of Representatives unanimously approved H.R. 4040, the Consumer Product Safety Commission Modernization Act of 2007, that virtually eliminates lead from children’s toys (down to 100 parts per million by 2012) and increases the funding of the CPSC. A Senate committee approved its own version of an anti-lead/pro-CPSC bill in October, but it hasn’t reached a floor vote yet—so sometime (early?) next year a final bill should be hammered out to send to the White House. Unless, of course, the lead toy furor disappears after Christmas.
Ranjit Bedi, a Californian, has filed a lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard and Staples in a U.S. District Court in Boston, accusing the two companies of colluding to prevent the sale of third-party ink cartridges in Staples stores. Bedi is accusing HP of paying Staples over $100 million to get it to stop selling lower-priced ink refills, but none of the news sources we found supply any evidence to support that figure, so we hope Bedi has more than just a gut feeling about this.
Today, in an attempt to anger fans of both regulation and deregulation, the FCC approved two new rules. The first one restricts cable companies to owning no more than 30% of a market; the second one “gives owners of newspapers more leeway to buy radio and television stations in the largest cities.” One nice thing about the first rule is that Comcast can’t buy any more cable companies. One bad thing about the second one is that it will likely mean that Rupert Murdoch will win “permanent waivers to control two television stations in New York, as well as The New York Post and The Wall Street Journal.”
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RECALLS: Victoria’s Secret Stuffer Bear (choking), Discount School Supply Giant Measuring Chart (lead), AAFES “Soldier Bear” Toys (lead), Honda Walk-Behind Lawn Mowers (laceration), Bombardier Ski-Doo® Model Year 2008 MXZ X 600 RS Snowmobiles (crashing),
Over at the Consumer Law & Policy blog there is a post about the legal troubles of Justin Leonard, the owner of InfomercialScams.com, a site that posts unedited reviews of various infomercial products.
Fortune recently published a list of 2007’s 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, and then the Seattle Post-Intelligencer cooked that down to just 9 really good ones. Now we’re summarizing the Seattle PI article. (If you’d like to play along, pick just a couple of business blunders from our summary and write them on a sticky note—we’d like to get this down to a six-word fortune cookie by December 31st.) Some of the Seattle PI’s picks include the rats at the KFC in NYC, the GHB toy beads, Best Buy’s in-store kiosk version of its website with higher prices, Jay-Z’s dog-fur coats, and that time when SkyWest wouldn’t let that passenger pee, and so he had to go in an air-sickness bag, which led to him being questioned by the police when he finally got off the plane.
The CPSI has announced its intention to sue Sara Lee over its “Soft & Smooth Made with Whole Grain White Bread,” which claims to combine “all the taste and texture of white bread with the goodness of whole grain,” when actually “there is more water in this product than whole grain,” according to the CSPI.
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