MilConsumer Blog Feed

Social media permeates the lives of many people – we use it to stay in touch, make new friends, shop, and have fun. But reports to the FTC show that social media is also increasingly where scammers go to con us. More than one in four people who reported losing money to fraud in 2021 said it started on social media with an ad, a post, or a message. [1] In fact, the data suggest that social media was far more profitable to scammers in 2021 than any...

Shoppers can find a plethora of apps, trackers, and sensors that hold or capture almost every conceivable form of personal health information. If your business or nonprofit offers products like that or provides certain services to entities that do – and you aren’t subject to HIPAA – you may be covered by the FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule (HBNR). The FTC has two new publications to help determine if the Rule applies to you and the steps...

The Omicron variant has consumers saying “Omigosh,” but even before the current surge, advertisers have been using questionable COVID-related claims to promote their products. FTC staff sent 25 more Cease and Desist Demands to businesses, most of whom have made unsubstantiated prevention or treatment representations for tinctures, teas, and sundry services. But there’s a key point that differentiates these Demands from the more than 400 letters...

Small businesses, the FTC is on your side. According to a proposed FTC settlement with Dun & Bradstreet, D&B took big bucks from small businesses with the promise to improve their credit reports, but the primary business that benefited from D&B’s pricey services was Dun & Bradstreet itself. The FTC alleges that Dun & Bradstreet deceived companies about the purported benefits of its CreditBuilder line of products; used deceptive automatic renewal...

Log4j is a ubiquitous piece of software used to record activities in a wide range of systems found in consumer-facing products and services. Recently, a serious vulnerability in the popular Java logging package, Log4j (CVE-2021-44228) was disclosed, posing a severe risk to millions of consumer products to enterprise software and web applications. This vulnerability is being widely exploited by a growing set of attackers. When vulnerabilities are...

As a certain elusive children’s videogame character will attest, precise geolocation can be highly sensitive information. According to a settlement the FTC just announced with OpenX Technologies, Inc. – a real-time bidding platform that enables targeted advertising on websites and apps – OpenX deceived people about their right to opt out of the collection of precise location data. What’s more, OpenX collected personal information from kids under...

Gift cards may be at the top of your holiday gift giving list. But there’s another list that gift cards top , and it’s decidedly less festive. According to the FTC’s latest Consumer Protection Data Spotlight, reports received in the Consumer Sentinel database reveal that gift cards are the #1 payment method of choice for scammers, leading to a reported $148 million stolen from consumers. Is your business taking steps to protect customers from...

Gift cards are an easy way to give. Reports to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel show they’re also an easy way to take. About one in four people who report losing money to fraud say it happened when a scammer tricked them into giving the numbers on the back of a gift card. 1 Gift cards are far more frequently reported than any other payment method for fraud, 2 and the numbers have reached staggering new highs compared to past years. 3 In the first nine...

As the holidays – and the end of the tax year – draw near, people are likely to approach small business owners with requests for charitable contributions. But scammers are hard at work with their own holiday rush. To protect your business from fraud and to amplify the impact of your donations on the charities that matter to you, these simple steps can help ensure that Giving Tuesday isn’t followed by Regretful Wednesday. A standard list of...

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...