Security News
Sadly, over the years, we've needed to write numerous Naked Security warnings about romance scammers and sextortionists. The bad news is that there is a form of online sexual extortion that is effectively hybrid of romance scamming and porn scamming, where the criminals involved do indeed have content with which to blackmail you.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has ordered Residual Pumpkin Entity, the former owner of the CafePress t-shirt and merchandise site, to pay a $500,000 fine for covering up a data breach impacting more than 23 million customers and failing to protect their data. After its servers were breached multiple times, it tried to cover up the major data breach resulting from its sloppy security practices.
The Federal Trade Commission has fined Twitter $150 million for using phone numbers and email addresses collected to enable two-factor authentication for targeted advertising. "As the complaint notes, Twitter obtained data from users on the pretext of harnessing it for security purposes but then ended up also using the data to target users with ads. This practice affected more than 140 million Twitter users, while boosting Twitter's primary source of revenue," said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan.
The Federal Trade Commission today proposed an order requiring Connecticut-based internet service provider Frontier Communications to stop "Lying" to its customers and support its high-speed internet claims. "Today's proposed order requires Frontier to back up its high-speed claims. It also arms customers lured in by Frontier's lies with free, easy options for dropping their slow service."
Today, the US Federal Trade Commission sued Intuit, the maker of tax preparation software TurboTax, over deceptive advertising campaigns pitching free tax filing products that millions couldn't use. As the consumer protection watchdog explained, Intuit allegedly pushed supposedly "Free" products in a years-long ad campaign, misleading Americans that they could use TurboTax to file their taxes for free.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission wants to slap the former owner of the CafePress custom t-shirt and merchandise site with a $500,000 fine for failing to secure its users' data and attempting to cover up a significant data breach impacting millions. As the consumer protection watchdog explained, CafePress' former owner, Residual Pumpkin Entity, stored its customers' Social Security numbers and password reset answers in plain text, and their data longer than necessary.
The US Federal Trade Commission said today that Americans reported losses of more than $5.8 billion to fraud during last year, a massive total increase of over 70% compared to the losses reported in 2020. The FTC added a total of roughly 5.7 million consumer reports to its Consumer Sentinel Network secure online database in 2021.
The US Federal Trade Commission said today that it will take legal action against Voice-over-Internet Protocol service providers who do not hand over information requested during robocall investigations. The Commission charged Alcazar Networks in December 2020 with facilitating illegal telemarketing calls after it provided VoIP services to an Indian company that used "911" as the caller ID and impersonated the Social Security Administration.
The US Federal Trade Commission said that Americans reported record high losses of $547 million to romance scams in 2021, up almost 80% compared to 2020 and over six times compared to losses reported in 2017. Financial losses stemming from romance scams have skyrocketed during recent years, with a total of $1.3 billion lost over the past five years.
As revealed by the FTC, over 95,000 US consumers reported losses of roughly $770 million after getting scammed on social media platforms. "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. In fact, the data suggest that social media was far more profitable to scammers in 2021 than any other method of reaching people." the FTC said.