MilConsumer Blog Feed

With more than a century of consumer protection experience under our belt, we at the FTC know that hard times for American families can be boom times for scammers. Today’s COVID-19 pandemic is the latest crisis creating fertile ground for fraud – and scammers today have a new and powerful weapon: social media platforms. These platforms generally earn their revenue by targeting users with advertising. The more time we spend on platforms consuming...

November 11th is Veterans Day, a time to honor the nation’s former military personnel. Every year more than 180,000 servicemembers leave the military to join the ranks of the nation’s 18 million veterans. When the troops transition back to civilian life, launching their next career — whether that means starting their own business or finding a job — is one of the first tasks at hand. Nearly 6% of all businesses are owned by veterans (according to...

If recent headlines about ransomware attacks on companies have you worried, your concerns are well-founded. Earlier this year, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency – you may know them as CISA – issued a Fact Sheet on Rising Ransomware Threat to Operational Technology Assets. The computer criminals who traffic in ransomware try to exploit vulnerabilities in technology and soft spots in human nature...

The FTC just sent almost $60 million in checks and PayPal payments to eligible drivers who had their tips illegally taken by Amazon. Our advice to Amazon Flex drivers: Watch your mailbox for a check. Our advice to companies that hire gig workers: Watch what you say to workers and customers – and live up to your claims. When customers placed orders through Amazon’s Prime Now or AmazonFresh services, Amazon asked “How much do you want to tip the...

If businesses make coronavirus prevention or treatment claims for their products, it’s time to get up to speed on the COVID-19 Consumer Protection Act. The Department of Justice and the FTC just filed their latest action under the law, seeking civil penalties from the marketers of Xlear, a nasal spray the complaint alleges has been deceptively advertised to offer “up to four hours” of protection from COVID-19 and as “part of a layered defense to...

Money-making claims have been around for as long as there’s been money. They show up in promotions for gig work, multilevel marketing, “be your own boss” seminars, and work-from-home offers. But when tried-and-true tactics turn into tried-and untrue, the FTC has a long history of challenging deceptive claims related to money-making opportunities. Those misrepresentations are the subject of the FTC’s latest use of its penalty offense authority...

The Federal Trade Commission is aggressively hiring Technologists to help drive the agency’s work, ensure a vibrant technology marketplace, conduct investigations, and hold companies and people who violate the law accountable. If you’re a technology researcher, engineer, UX designer, content strategist, or product manager and are thinking about joining us in this new approach to our work, you may have some questions about working for the federal...

The FTC just released a report based on data received from major players in the mobile Internet market and A Look at What ISPs Know About You: Examining the Privacy Practices of Six Major Internet Service Providers is an eye opener. According to the FTC, several Internet service providers collect and share far more personal data than their customers expect while failing to give customers meaningful choice about how that data can be used. Under...

The FTC has been warning consumers for years about impersonation scams – calls that falsely claim to come from the IRS, the Social Security Administration, or other offices or businesses. The messages try to coerce people into making immediate payments or turning over sensitive personal information. The FTC’s latest Data Spotlight focuses on the rampant rise of Amazon impersonation scams that have already bilked consumers out of millions of...

Scammers impersonate all sorts of businesses, but reports to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel point to Amazon as a runaway favorite for scammers. From July 2020 through June 2021, about one in three people who reported a business impersonator said the scammer claimed to be Amazon. Reports about Amazon impersonators increased more than fivefold during this period. 1 About 96,000 people reported being targeted, and nearly 6,000 said they lost money...