Staples and Office Depot want to merge and form one mega-chain of office supply stores that you mostly visit to drop off UPS packages. The Federal Trade Commission doesn’t approve of this union, because both sell supplies and serve as wholesalers to smaller office suppliers. The companies announced late yesterday that they’ve reached an agreement with Essendant, a smaller national supplier, to take over some of that business if the merger goes through. [More]
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Essendant Agrees To Buy Commercial Business From Staples And Office Depot If FTC Approves Merger
By 2.17.16
Credit Card Processor For Work-At-Home Scam Companies Settles FTC Charges
By 2.11.16
When you respond to an ad promising untold wealth if you start an at-home business, someone in a call center will contact you and try to extract your credit or debit card number. There needs to be a credit card processing company involved to run that transaction, though, and the company that did so for the Tax Club work-at-home scam operation has now settled up with the Federal Trade Commission for its role in the scam. [More]
Scammy Sellers Of AF Plus, Final Trim Weight-Loss Pills Made Millions From Bogus “Risk-Free” Trials
By 2.5.16
You may have heard radio ads for weight loss supplements named AF Plus and Final Trim, promising “24 hours of fat burning power” and “maximum weight loss,” along with supposed real-world testimonials about how well these pills worked — and how you can try them now through a “risk-free” trial. Problem is, those people in the ads claiming they lost all that weight are just as fictitious as the free trial. [More]
Feds Clarify When & How Advertisers Need To Reveal They Paid For Sponsored Stories
By 12.22.15
If you’re reading a website about business travel and you read an interesting news story about saving money on hotels, does it matter to you if that “article” was paid for by an advertiser? If so, how should that sponsorship be communicated to the reader? [More]
Federal Regulators Still Objecting To Marriage Of Staples And Office Depot
By 12.21.15
Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission went to court in an effort to block the pending merger of office-supply mega chains Staples and Office Depot, saying that it would result in too little competition in the market for supplies being sold to businesses. Since then, Staples has tried to revise the deal to make it more palatable, but to no avail. [More]
Collusion Scandal Grips Rug Accessory Industry
By 12.16.15
We’d like to think that only huge corporations — titans of telecom, colossi of crude, barons of beef — run by guys who look like Rich Uncle Pennybags are involved in sketchy backroom collusion. But even players in “I didn’t know they even existed” markets try to get overly clever and rig the system to their advantage. [More]
More Than 500,000 People Ask CenturyLink To Help End Robocalls
By 12.15.15
Even though the FCC has said that landline operators can offer robocall-blocking technology to their customers, many of them have so far chosen to not do so. That’s why our colleagues at Consumers Union hand-delivered a petition with more than 500,000 signatures to CenturyLink this morning, hoping to drive home how fed-up consumers are with these unwanted interruptions. [More]
Amazon Sends Me Someone Else’s Order. Why Don’t They Care If I Send It Back?
By 12.2.15 — Updated: 5.25.17
In the midst of all the shopping on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday, Wet and Wild Wednesday, Thanksgiving 2.0 For People Who Were Out Of Town Or In The Hospital Last Week Thursday, and Black Friday All Over Again Because Why Not?, there are oodles of Amazon packages landing on shoppers’ doorsteps. In some rare cases, those packages might end up on the wrong doorstep, so why does Amazon not seem terribly concerned about getting those items back? [More]
Google Accused Of Snooping On Students’ Internet Activity
By 12.1.15
Google is one of more than 200 companies that have signed on to the “Student Privacy Pledge,” in which it promises to, among other things, “Not collect, maintain, use or share student personal information beyond that needed for authorized educational/school purposes.” But a new complaint accuses the Internet biggie of breaking its oath and spying on kids’ online activity. [More]
Car Dealers Can’t Scream “Zero Down On All Leases” If Most Buyers Won’t Qualify For Deal
By 11.24.15
Car dealers are known for hyperbolic slogans like “Everybody rides!” or “Nobody walks away from our lot!,” but that sort of puffery is a far cry from repeatedly claiming that the advertised lease price includes “Zip, Zero, Zilch — Nothing Down!” only to hide the ugly truth in fine print that most people won’t understand. [More]
FTC Bans Wire Transfers, Reloadable Cash Cards, And Payment Orders In Phone Transactions
By 11.18.15
We’ve shared warnings about many different types of telemarketing scams, but they all have one thing in common: they extract money from their victims using quick and untraceable methods like wire transfers or prepaid debit cards. Today, the Federal Trade Commission announced an amendment to current telemarketing rules that’s meant to protect consumers from fraud over the phone lines. [More]
Feds File Criminal, Civil Cases Against More Than 100 Supplement Companies
By 11.17.15
A sweeping multi-agency federal investigation has resulted in a slew of criminal and civil charges being brought against more than 100 companies that either make or market supposed dietary supplements for selling products that allegedly contain ingredients other than those listed on the label, or products that make unsubstantiated health or disease-treatment claims. [More]
Feds Shut Down Phony Apple, Microsoft, Google Tech Support Scammers
By 11.13.15
While consumers are much more tech-savvy today than we were during the days of Windows 3.1 and baud modems, there are still a lot of people whose tech-insecurity makes them potential prey for bogus tech support businesses that make money by convincing victims their computers are infected with viruses. [More]
Sale Of Commercial Supply Business Could Let Staples-Office Depot Merger Go Through
By 10.26.15
One of the barriers to the formation of the StaplesMaxDepot office-supply Voltron has been the commercial supply businesses that both companies run: in addition to running retail stores, they both also do business delivering office supplies to corporate clients. One possibility could let the mega-merger go forward: Staples could sell its commercial supply business to competitor Essendant. [More]
Scammers Who Defrauded Scam Victims Barred From Scamming Anyone Else
By 10.26.15
Imagine you’ve been a victim of that old “woke up in a bathtub with my kidney gone” urban legend. As you stumble out of the hotel in urgent need of medical care, you come across a helpful doctor who will tend to your wounds… only to wake up in another tub with another missing organ. Replace “unauthorized donation of precious, life-sustaining organs” with “telemarketing fraud” and you’ve got the basis for a scam that took in nearly $3 million from people who had already been the victims of fraud. [More]
Regulators Drop Probe Into Walmart’s “Made In The U.S.A.” Labeling After Designation Dropped From Website
By 10.21.15
Four months after an advertising watchdog group called out Walmart’s website for selling more than 100 products labeled as “Made in the U.S.A.” even though they were manufactured in other countries, raising the watchful eye of federal regulators, the retailer announced it had removed the designation from its products. [More]
How Drug Companies Use “Product Hopping” To Fight Off Affordable Generic Drugs
By 10.1.15 — Updated: 2.7.17
You’re probably used to the idea of your doctor prescribing you a brand-name drug and your pharmacist automatically substituting a lower-cost generic equivalent that saves you, the drugstore, and your insurer money. But there’s a practice in the industry known as “product hopping” that brand-name drug makers can use to repeatedly delay generic versions from reaching consumers. [More]
Wyndham Hotels Loses Legal Battle With Feds Over Lax Security Practices
By 8.24.15
If a consumer-facing company, like say a massive hotel chain, touts its dedication to the security of customer information and then does something to repeatedly put that information at risk — like storing unencrypted credit card data on barely secure networks — can they be forced to share some of the blame when hundreds of thousands of credit card numbers are stolen? The hotel chain says that would be blaming the victim, but a federal appeals court has affirmed the Federal Trade Commission’s authority to go after businesses that fail to live up to their security promises. [More]
