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Maybe you’re opening a small business or hiring a household employee? Or you’re starting a nonprofit or administering an estate? If you’re creating or reorganizing a legal entity, chances are you’re going to need an Internal Revenue Service (IRS)-assigned Employer Identification Number (EIN) to file your taxes and confirm your organization’s identity. The IRS’s website has a free and easy tool to get one, but scammers don’t tell you that. Today...

Blizzards. Hurricanes. Floods. Wildfires. No matter the season, an extreme weather event or natural disaster could be right around the corner. And when – not if – an emergency happens, you may need to make critical decisions for your business, fast. Scammers know it's the perfect time to strike. Is your business ready? If you don’t already have a weather emergency plan, today’s the day to make one. The FTC has websites in English and Spanish to...

When businesses know the rules of the road, they can confidently invest in new ventures, technologies, and products. Under my leadership, the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection (BCP) is committed to providing legal clarity to legitimate businesses that wish to deal honestly with their customers and comply with the law. By offering clear and consistent rules of the road, legitimate businesses can comply with confidence. Businesses that choose not...

The FTC recently filed a case to stop what it describes as a fast-moving scam involving a group of companies offering business opportunities and a supposed credit repair service. Although the names and details changed as the alleged scam evolved, the FTC says the defendants’ business opportunities had at least one thing in common: misleading promises that people could earn a lot of money with relatively little effort. And when it came to the...

Each year, the Commission adjusts the minimum dollar jurisdictional thresholds that determine reportability under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act based on the change in gross national product in the prior year. The 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act created filing fee tiers with filing fees. The thresholds for these filing fees, as well as the fee amounts, are also adjusted annually along with the jurisdictional thresholds. The Commission recently...

The FTC has been hard at work over the past few years. Part of the agency's mission has been to build internal muscles to better anticipate how existing and emerging technologies can harm consumers and competition. This is why the FTC established the Office of Technology (OT), a first in the agency's 110-year history. OT's work has become an indelible part of the agency, an acknowledgment of how deeply technology is ingrained across the economy...

Any marketer will tell you: great storytelling sells. Whether your product is a sports drink, a service, or a videogame loot box, the more your ads draw people in, the more likely it is they’ll buy whatever you’re selling. But, especially when you're marketing to kids and teens, you need to think carefully about your design practices. Consider today’s proposed settlement, filed by the Department of Justice on the FTC’s behalf, where the FTC...

Today, the FTC released a staff report with OT staff’s findings from the agency’s study into large AI Partnerships and Investments. The last two years have seen the creation or expansion of three partnerships between the largest cloud service providers (“CSPs”) and prominent AI developers: Microsoft-OpenAI, Amazon-Anthropic, and Google-Anthropic. These partnerships have included more than $20 billion in cumulative financial investment [1] and...

Today, staff of the Bureau of Competition published four reports covering fiscal years 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021 on the types and terms of the pharmaceutical patent settlement agreements filed with the FTC under the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 (“MMA”). The MMA requires brand drug and generic manufacturers (and since October 2018, biologic and biosimilar manufacturers) to file certain types of patent...

Today, FTC staff released initial insights from the Surveillance Pricing 6(b) study, highlighting findings that intermediaries have access to a wide swath of data types and data sources (including direct consumer data, inferred data, and first- or third-party sources) to power tools that can influence the price a consumer or audience sees. While there is still much more work to do, the agency continues to proactively learn from and engage...