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.