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A skin cream that can reduce body size. Are historians sure that wasn’t what Ponce de Leon was seeking? It’s certainly what buyers are looking for, if ads are any indication. But claims like that have to be backed up by solid science, as is clear from the FTC’s $900,000 settlement with Beiersdorf, Inc., marketer of Nivea My Silhouette! (Yes, the exclamation point is on the package.) Ads for the product touted its “Bio-slim Complex,” a combination...

Sometimes it’s great to put stuff to more than one use. Think the versatile Swiss Army knife, the iconic Little Black Dress, or the typical elementary school “cafetorium” where kids can eat lunch, shoot hoops, and put on plays. But when what’s at issue is information from people’s credit reports, that kind of double duty can violate the Fair Credit Reporting Act — as the FTC’s $1.8 million settlement with Teletrack, Inc., makes clear. In FCRA...

You have some job openings at your company or maybe you’re thinking of promoting people to new positions. You’ve winnowed that stack of resumes down to some promising candidates. Now it’s nitty gritty time: background checks. Employment background checks can include information from a variety of sources: credit reports, employment and salary history, criminal records — and these days, even social media. But regardless of the type of information...

Yes, it’s a global marketplace, but geography still matters. Misrepresentations about where a company is based can have significant implications for buyers. That’s the message of an FTC settlement announced today against a California online retailer that allegedly deceived British consumers into thinking it was a “hometown operation” by falsely using a .co.uk website. The settlement puts an end to the FTC’s law enforcement action against Jaivin...

You can swim freestyle. You can work freelance. And there are those among us who still hold up lighters and yell “Play Free Bird.” But for marketers, one thing you can’t do is advertise a product as free and then bill customers’ credit cards — not once and certainly not over and over and over again. The legal theories advanced in the pending case against Canadian Jesse Willms, ten companies the FTC says he controls, and other individual and...

With a corporate name like Lookout, it pays to — well — look out. Unfortunately, according to the FTC’s complaint against Lookout Services, Inc., the company’s questionable security practices left the door open for an employee of one of Lookout’s customers to access sensitive information, including Social Security numbers, of thousands of people. Lookout sells a web-based product called the I-9 Solution. Taking its name from Immigration Services...

The French movie classic “The Wages of Fear” — remade in 1977 as “The Sorcerer” by American director William Friedkin — was a taut thriller about a team of toughs transporting a payload of volatile nitroglycerine to a remote location in South America. They meet with hazards along the way: a rope bridge hanging by a thread over a flood-swollen river, a boulder blocking a twisted mountain path, and a stretch of road so pot-holed it’s called “The...

If you haven’t seen the ads, you’ve probably been too busy listening to eight-tracks and playing Pong because billions — with a capital B — have been served up online. They look like news investigations about acai berry weight loss products conducted by independent journalists for reputable news outlets featuring the logos of national media and follow-up comments by satisfied consumers. Except that according to the FTC, they’re not news...

Science, studies, and statistics. There’s a reason advertisers feature them so prominently. When used accurately, they can be powerful tools for distinguishing your product from the competitors. But scientific claims — especially health-related ones — need solid proof. That was the cause of the recent legal dust-up between the FTC and Oreck Corporation involving the Oreck Halo vacuum and the Oreck ProShield Plus portable room air cleaner. The...

Business practices at odds with promises in the company’s privacy policy. The failure to disclose adequately that the contacts with whom users emailed and chatted the most would become public by default. Confusing and hard-to-find controls to limit the sharing of personal info. False claims about adherence to the U.S.-EU Safe Harbor privacy framework. Those were the allegations in the FTC’s complaint against Google. What changes will the agency’s...