FTC

UPDATED 1:17 PM ET (FEB. 27. U.S.A.): The FTC has sued six Nevada-based companies with ties to a call center in St. George, Utah, amid allegations that the firms and corporate officers scammed consumers and payment processors in a $25 million fraud scheme. Nevada and St. George were ground zero for the alleged $275 million [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Utah has been abuzz since the Salt Lake Tribune reported on Jan. 11 that a plea deal between Jeremy Johnson and the government had unraveled when prosecutors balked “at placing a list of people into the record that Johnson said prosecutors had promised not to indict if he entered a guilty plea.” “Included [...]

BULLETIN: The FTC and attorneys general for the states of Illinois, Kentucky, and North Carolina have moved against Fortune Hi-Tech Marketing (FHTM), alleging it is a pyramid scheme. A federal judge in the Northern District of Illinois has appointed a receiver and ordered an asset freeze. FHTM’s website at FHTM.com now resolves to a site [...]

On March 23, 2012, the PP Blog temporarily removed from public view three stories pertaining to accused Utah fraudster Jeremy Johnson. The explanation of why the stories were taken offline temporarily is here. On March 23, 2012, the PP Blog’s security software recorded a “mass injection attack” as the Blog visited a domain styled CollotGuerard.com [...]

BULLETIN: Calling it a “major international crackdown on tech support scams,” the FTC has charged multiple companies and individuals in an alleged fraud scheme in which consumers were duped into believing their computers were infected with “viruses, spyware and other malware” and then charged to remove it. To cover their tracks, the FTC charged, the [...]

What: Investor Fraud Summits. Where/When: Stamford, Conn. (today from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. EDT at the University of Connecticut – Stamford Campus); Nashville, Tenn. (Oct. 4 from 8:45 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. EDT at Vanderbilt University Law School’s Flynn Auditorium located at 131 21st Avenue South) ; San Francisco (Oct. 9, in Walnut Creek, [...]

BULLETIN: In announcing deeply troubling allegations today, the FTC said that seven rent-to-own companies and a software firm spied on customers who leased computers. The customers were spied on in their own homes and at WiFi spots, the FTC alleged. Although the companies agreed to settle the FTC’s charges, the allegations alone introduce the specter [...]

BULLETIN: The CFTC has gone to federal court in the Southern District of New York, alleging that Marc Perlman of Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., and his firm, iGlobal Strategic Management LLC, were running a commodity-pool and Forex Ponzi scheme targeted at deaf Christians. Perlman and the company have been charged with fraud. The CFTC said the [...]

EDITOR’S NOTE: Payza seems to have taken an important step Friday in the battle against online fraud. The payment-processing company perhaps deserves an accolade for that. But it’s too soon to heap praise on Payza. We are particularly concerned about the phrasing of a specific line in Payza’s altered User Agreement. More on that below [...]

BULLETIN: In an unprecedented move, the SEC today announced that it had suspended trading in 379 penny stocks, saying the companies were delinquent in filings and ripe for hijacking and scams involving reverse mergers and pump-and-dump schemes. “The trading suspension marks the most companies ever suspended in a single day by the agency as it [...]

Owing to time constraints, the PP Blog hasn’t written much about Zeek Rewards, an MLM “program” married to a penny-auction site known as “Zeekler.” For simplicity, we’ll refer to both arms as “Zeek.” The structure of Zeek and precisely what it does are just plain baffling. Even so, it appears to have a legion of [...]