FTC

A person is shown counting out money in their hands

If you got a loan from this company, you might have money coming your way

January 25th, 2022

Andy Meek

Back in April of 2018, the Federal Trade Commission sued the online lending marketplace LendingClub, asserting that the company was falsely promising loan applicants they could receive a specific loan amount along with an important qualifier. No additional hidden fees. In reality, however, the federal agency filed suit against the company over the allegation that …

Business

Equifax is paying $5.5M to banks, but nothing to victims of the 2017 data breach

May 21st, 2020

Andy Meek

As surprising as it might sound, victims of the Equifax data breach from back in 2017 still haven’t received their share of the $700 million Equifax settlement with the FTC yet. Be that as it may, however, the credit reporting agency has gone ahead and reached a $5.5 million agreement to pay banks that issued …

Tech

FTC may seek injunction to prevent Facebook from merging chat features across Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp

December 12th, 2019

Yoni Heisler

The FTC may seek an injunction in order to prevent Facebook from tightly integrating features across its suite of messaging services. The potential injunction, The Wall Street Journal notes, arises out of fear that once the integration is complete, breaking up Facebook into disparate entities would become difficult, if not impossible. Word of Facebook’s plan …

Business

AT&T will pay a $60 million fine for throttling its ‘unlimited data’ plans

November 5th, 2019

Andy Meek

From now on, AT&T is going to be prohibited from making any official representations about its mobile data speeds and amounts “without disclosing any material restrictions on the speed or amount of data.” That’s according to a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission announced on Tuesday, which also includes AT&T paying $60 million to resolve …

Tech

Coming Wednesday: FTC complaint against Facebook over mishandling of user phone numbers

July 23rd, 2019

Andy Meek

Facebook’s regulatory woes are about to get worse, with the Federal Trade Commission set to unveil a complaint against the social networking giant on Wednesday — the same day the company releases its second-quarter earnings — that’s focused on the company’s sketchy mishandling of user phone numbers. The complaint would follow the FTC’s vote last …

Tech

Equifax agrees to a settlement of up to $700 million for massive data breach

July 22nd, 2019

Chris Smith

Equifax a couple of years ago had to disclose a massive hack that affected some 147 million people. Hackers were able to extract from Equifax’s servers plenty of personal data, including names and birth dates, addresses, social security numbers, and some 209,000 payment card numbers and expiration dates. Since then, the FTC sued the company, …

Tech

Leaked Facebook emails might prove Zuckerberg knew about questionable privacy practices

June 13th, 2019

Chris Smith

Facebook is under investigation due to policies related to user privacy. Shocking, right? And this time around, things aren’t looking very good for the company, which is already willing to settle the matter by paying a huge penalty. A new report shows that Facebook is worried that internal email exchanges might reveal Mark Zuckerberg was …

Business

Facebook could be fined up to $5 billion by the FTC due to privacy violations

April 24th, 2019

Andy Meek

Facebook has been dealing with one privacy-related scandal after another for more than a year now, a reality that’s about to present the social networking company with a seriously heavy financial penalty. The company shared its first quarter results for 2019 Wednesday afternoon, and as part of that disclosure came Facebook’s acknowledgement that it expects …

Tech

FTC slaps companies responsible for billions of robocalls with multi-million dollar fines

March 29th, 2019

Yoni Heisler

Over the past few years, spam calls have become an increasing and seemingly inescapable nuisance. In 2018 alone, a report found that the number of spam calls jumped by a whopping 325%. Compounding matters is that many of the scammers behind the plague of robocalls use numbers that look remarkably similar to a recipient’s own …

Tech

The new wave of Netflix phishing attacks is so bad that the FTC issued a warning

December 27th, 2018

Mike Wehner

The year may be drawing to a close but that doesn’t mean scammers are taking any time off for the holidays. A new bulletin issued by the Federal Trade Commission highlights a fresh wave of Netflix phishing scams that have been landing in email inboxes around the globe. The scam itself is old. It’s a …