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Adult Sites Pay $30 Mln To Settle Fraud Charges

Posted by timothy on from the class-action dept.

Brian writes: "This article states that the operators of www.playgirl.com and several other Web sites offering adult-oriented content agreed to pay $30 million to settle charges that they illegally billed thousands of customers for what were advertised as free services, the Federal Trade Commission said on Monday."

9 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. Payment to victims by fava · · Score: 2, Insightful

    A quote from the article:
    The $30 million will be distributed to consumers who have been defrauded by Crescent Publishing.

    If that proves impractical, the money will be divided equally between the U.S. Treasury and the State of New York, the FTC said.

    Want to bet that it will be very impractical to distrubute all the funds to the victims. They will probibly make the application procedure so complex and convoluted that most people will give up.

    1. Re:Payment to victims by imrdkl · · Score: 2

      You know those checks won't be arriving in discrete, brown envelopes, either.

    2. Re:Payment to victims by gopherdata · · Score: 1

      They'll probably take a pointer from .

  2. Be quick... by tunah · · Score: 1

    /me quickly signs up for pay service, fills in form...

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    Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
  3. I bet if they name on the statement... by gatkinso · · Score: 1

    ...was something like "Anal Loving Fisters Corporation" most people would not have disputed the charge.... they'd be too embarrassed to!

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    I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
  4. Fixed Link by gopherdata · · Score: 1

    They'll probably take a pointer from the Australian Refund Scam.

  5. What about those dialers? by hughk · · Score: 1
    I would have thought that the main problem was the dialer. Surprisingly they are propagating outside the Pr0n world and I had a regular web-site give me a pop-up promising me faster access to (non-Pr0n) movie trailers and attempting to d/l a little application to help.

    This is definitely fraud too.

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    See my journal, I write things there
  6. This doesn't look like your shade of lipstick by Nitroshock · · Score: 1

    Three hundred dollars for a playgirl.com subscription?!?! I don't remember a playgirl.com subscription.

    --It says "Free" so I'll go ahead and give them my credit card.

    1. Re:This doesn't look like your shade of lipstick by goethean · · Score: 1

      No joke. Who in their right mind would give their credit card number to a porn site for a "free" service??? At some point, it ceases to be fraud and becomes a tax on stupidity (apologies to Dennis Miller).

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      God is only experiencing itself -- Nisargadatta Maharaj