Tag: Consumer Protection

The FTC reached a settlement with Apitor Technology over allegations that its app enabled a third party in China to collect geolocation information from children without parental consent.

The Citizens Disability, LLC and its subsidiary will pay a $1 million penalty to resolve FTC allegations that they made tens of millions of illegal calls to consumers and that they misrepresented that they were calling consumers in response to inquiries about their eligibility for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) benefits. 

Under a final order with the FTC, Seek Capital and its CEO Roy Ferman have been permanently banned from providing business financing, debt relief and credit repair services to settle allegations that the firm deceived entrepreneurs and small business owners seeking business funding.

The FTC is taking action against the operator of the Sendit anonymous messaging app for unlawfully collecting personal data from children, misleading users by sending messages from fake “people,” and tricking consumers into purchasing paid subscriptions by falsely promising to reveal the senders of anonymous messages.

Dun & Bradstreet agreed to a $5.7 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over allegations the firm violated a 2022 order.

The Federal Trade Commission, along with 22 agencies from 19 states, stopped a deceptive charity fundraising scheme and its operators who made false or deceptive claims to U.S. donors.

Kars-R-Us.com, Inc. (Kars) and its operators, Michael Irwin and Lisa Frank, solicited charitable donations nationwide on behalf of United Breast Cancer Foundation, Inc. (UBCF), a charity that claims to assist individuals affected by breast cancer, according to a complaint filed by the FTC and states (link to complaint).

Under a proposed settlement order reached with the FTC and its state partners, Kars and its operators face restrictions on future fundraising activities and Irwin, Kars’s President and co-owner until 2022, will be permanently banned from fundraising.

The Federal Trade Commission is taking action against Amazon.com, Inc. for its years-long effort to enroll consumers into its Prime program without their consent while knowingly making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions to Prime.

In a complaint filed today, the FTC charges that Amazon has knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime. Specifically, Amazon used manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user-interface designs known as “dark patterns” to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically-renewing Prime subscriptions.

Amazon also knowingly complicated the cancellation process for Prime subscribers who sought to end their membership. The primary purpose of its Prime cancellation process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but to stop them. Amazon leadership slowed or rejected changes that would’ve made it easier for users to cancel Prime because those changes adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line. 

The FTC filed a complaint alleging that Mercury Marketing, LLC, and other defendants impersonated substance use disorder treatment clinics in Google search ads to deceptively route consumers trying to call those clinics to defendant clinics.

The FTC and seven states sued Ticketmaster and Live Nation alleging they deceived artists and consumers by engaging in bait-and-switch pricing through advertising lower prices for tickets than what consumers must pay to purchase tickets; deceptively claimed to impose strict limits on the number of tickets that consumers could purchase for an event, even though ticket brokers routinely and substantially exceeded those limits; and sold millions of tickets, often at much higher cost to consumers, on its resale platform that those brokers obtained in excess of artists’ ticket limits.