You might be getting $27 from a crooked smut peddler’s fortune
Late last week, the Federal Trade Commission started mailing out about 400,000 checks in the amount of $27.68. The money is part of settlement in the federal agency’s lawsuit against J.K. Publications, a California pornographer that, back in 1990s, ran up bogus charges on the credit card bills of hundreds of thousands of unwitting consumers.
If you get a check — or, for that matter, your spouse does — don’t jump to any conclusions. JK Publications was able to secure the credit-card numbers of people who never visited the company’s porn sites. The fees weren’t usually huge, and the company was banking on the idea that most people wouldn’t notice a mysterious charge of $20 or less.
(This sort of thing still happens today. I’ll be writing my Saturday column about “cramming,” or the unauthorized billing of telephone services. These charges are usually small, and easy to overlook on your monthly telephone bill. But they add up.)
Here’s some more info on how the scam worked: J.K. Publications purchased access to a database of credit card numbers from Charter Pacific Bank, of Agoura Hills, Calif. This database contained credit-card numbers for more than 3 million card holders who purchased goods or services from merchants with accounts at the bank. J.K. Publications then charged many of those same accounts. The fraud generated more than $40 million in “sales.”
The feds put J.K. Publications years ago, and the FTC was awarded $37.5 million verdict in 2000. But securing that money was easier said than done, largely because much of the company’s ill-gotten gains were parked in off-shore banks.
It’s worth noting that J.K. Publications is not affiliated with St. Louis’ own JK Publishing, which publishes poetry, literary journals and other non-pornographic works.
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Shouldn’t the banks that sold the actual credit card numbers of these consumers be held equally responsible here and in all cases such as this? Oh, how stupid of me, I forgot for just a moment there that the unscrupulous actions of banks whose business practices are worst than any thug are protected buy our unscrupulous politicians/government.
These banks are equally guilty as these scam artists but banks are a protected class because of our politicians. It’s just a doggy, doggy sick world that we live in because of very corrupted hearted people in offices of every branch in this country who could care less about people. It is the very reason why a healthcare overhaul will never happen, because most all of our politicians are in the pockets of insurers and special interest groups, there in Congress to protect their thug behaviors.
If people were smart they would replace everyone in office with new people who have been there two terms or more because they have been part of the problem and did not make enough noise to let the people know about all the harmful things that was happening at their and this country’s detriment. The sad things, as we can see so clearly now, nothing has changed with those in Washington. They, both Republicans and Democrats are road blocking Obama. I say vote them all out!