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Today, the FTC is announcing the Voice Cloning Challenge to address the present and emerging harms of artificial intelligence- or “AI”-enabled voice cloning technologies. Speech synthesis has been around for several decades. [1] Perhaps one of the most famous examples is CallText 5010, the robotic-sounding speech synthesizer [2] Stephen Hawking used after he lost his voice in 1985. And now, going beyond digital voices like Hawking’s and Apple’s...

Cloud computing has emerged and grown significantly over the recent decades – from its infancy in 2004, to a $576 billion industry in 2023. [1] FTC’s Office of Technology, Bureau of Competition, and Bureau of Consumer Protection worked together to examine four specific areas of cloud computing through a Request for Information (RFI) and a public panel of cloud computing experts. These areas included competition, single points of failure, security...

Consumers speak many languages and unfortunately scammers are conversant in all of them. That’s why the FTC has reinforced its fraud fighting capabilities by collecting scam reports in multiple languages . As a member of the business community, you can lend a hand by sharing these new resources with employees, friends, and others in your network. To report in Mandarin, Tagalog, Vietnamese, French, Arabic, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Polish, and...

We’ve warned professionals about online job scams involving phony “recruiters” who falsely claim to represent big-name businesses. Employment impersonators are still at it, but this time they’re approaching people with bogus offers to be “brand ambassadors” for well-known consumer products companies.

Scammers are hiding in plain sight on social media platforms and reports to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network point to huge profits. One in four people who reported losing money to fraud since 2021 said it started on social media. [1] Reported losses to scams on social media during the same period hit a staggering $2.7 billion, far higher than any other method of contact. And because the vast majority of frauds are not reported, this figure...

Sometimes being the “Home of . . .” is an honorific to be proud of. Kudos, Cleveland, for rock ‘n’ roll, and thank you, Buffalo, for your contribution to chicken wings. But the Birthplace of Frauds and Scams isn’t a nickname to be envied. According to an FTC Data Spotlight , reports from consumers suggest that in many instances, that’s becoming a moniker for social media. The Data Spotlight reveals that the most frequently reported losses to...

Preparing for an emergency used to be an easier task for small businesses. Coastal companies could plan for hurricane season and northern businesses could expect a blizzard or two every winter. But businesses now face a host of other potentially disruptive disasters – wildfires, power outages, public health emergencies, and cyberattacks, to name just a few. Don’t let National Preparedness Month come to a close without updating your company’s plan...

Businesses, platforms, social media influencers, and others who advertise or promote products to children online all have a role to play in ensuring that the boundary between advertising and entertainment is clear to children. Based in part on the insights from the 2022 FTC workshop, Protecting Kids from Stealth Advertising in Digital Media , that’s a key component of the 360° approach recommended in a just-published FTC Staff Perspective about...

There’s a scam targeting doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, but you could be a part of the cure.

We’ve all heard the adage “Proper preparation prevents poor performance.” It’s been attributed to everyone from Vince Lombardi to Secretary of State James Baker. As we’ve discussed in the first four installments of our Franchise Fundamentals series, proper preparation – including a thorough pre-commitment investigation into the franchise – may help reduce the risk of painful problems later. But what if a franchisee is concerned that a subsequent business breakdown could be due to a franchisor’s precarious promises?