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Tech support scams can happen to anyone: small business owners, your employees, and family members — especially those over 60, according to reports to the FTC. These scams usually happen when someone searches online, clicks a promising link, and suddenly gets frightening pop-up alerts warning that their computer is infected with malware. The alerts say to call a number to fix it immediately — and that’s when a so-called “tech support professional...

We’ve heard it loud and clear from tens of thousands of people: hidden and misleading fees, also known as junk fees, hurt consumers and businesses. Today the FTC announced it is sending to the Federal Register a bipartisan final rule that will target bait-and-switch pricing and other tactics used to hide and misrepresent total prices and fees for live-event tickets and short-term lodging. What’s the bottom line for covered businesses? Be upfront...

As companies depend on accumulating more consumer data to develop products such as artificial intelligence, targeted advertising, or surveillance pricing tools, they may create valuable pools of information that bad actors can target for illicit gain. While the use of consumer data grows, data breaches and digital threats persist as significant problems – but this does not need to be the status quo. Addressing underlying risks that lead to these...

A job you truly enjoy is a good thing, but if the work feels more like an online game than an actual job, you can bet it’s a scam. Reported losses to job scams increased more than threefold from 2020 to 2023 and, in just the first half of 2024, topped $220 million. [1] Driving this trend are skyrocketing reports about gamified job scams, often called task scams. About 20,000 people reported these scams in the first half of the year, compared to...

‘Tis the season for healthcare-related marketing and advertising. That’s right; it’s open enrollment time for the Health Insurance Marketplace, and it’s also almost the end of the plan year for Flexible Spending Accounts and Health Savings Accounts. If your business offers a health insurance plan or healthcare-related products, or creates ads for these products, you’re probably working overtime. Don’t take shortcuts or lose sight of marketing and...

In the Bureau of Economics, we value an open exchange of ideas between our staff and experts outside the agency. Such an exchange enables us to learn new ideas and perspectives, hone our professional skills, and receive feedback on our work. When we engage in such dialogue, transparency about actual, potential, or perceived conflicts is important. This is especially important given our role at the FTC in providing expert economic advice on policy...

The turkey is gone, and the relatives have departed. We’ve now officially entered holiday shopping season, also known as make-or-break busy season for small business owners relying on Q4 profits to carry them through the year. If you’re in that category, remember it’s not just busy season for your business; it’s also busy season for scammers who know that when you’re pulling long hours and rushing to fulfill orders, it’s the perfect time to try...

Earlier this year, the Office of Technology (OT) published a list of research questions and made reference to the long history in mathematics of doling out questions that, as mathematician Paul Erdős put it, “can isolate an essential difficulty in a particular area, serving as a benchmark against which progress ... can be measured.” [1] In the spirit of posing complex questions, the Traveling Salesman Problem is a classic problem in the theory of...

The FTC recently announced a new enforcement action in which it alleged that the data broker Mobilewalla collected and retained sensitive location information from consumers—often without their consent—and shared those details with third parties to target advertisements. This data can reveal visits to healthcare facilities, churches, labor unions, military installations, and other sensitive locations. While it is hardly the first time the FTC has...

Don’t judge a book by its cover – how a technology is named doesn’t tell you how it is used. This is the case with Data Clean Rooms (“DCRs”), which are not rooms, do not clean data, and have complicated implications for user privacy, despite their squeaky-clean name. Data Clean Rooms are cloud data processing services that let companies exchange and analyze data, restrained by rules that limit data use. They are typically used when two companies...