Consumer Fraud

The founder of a now-defunct credit counseling firm accused of cheating thousands of debtors is hiding assets even though he agreed to contribute millions of dollars to help repay the debtors, a court-appointed receiver told a federal judge Tuesday.

The hunt is on. As more shoppers scour the Internet for holiday deals, they're also being stalked -- by scammers. Today is Cyber Monday, the kickoff to the busiest online shopping period of the year. E-commerce is expected to hit a record this year, as Web-savvy shoppers and newbies alike hand over more of their holiday budgets to online retailers.

THE case underscores an issue growing ever-more prevalent in the home furnishings world: The Rug Co., a London-based purveyor of couture carpets designed by the likes of Vivienne Westwood, Paul Smith and Diane von Furstenberg, has filed a lawsuit accusing New York retailer ABC Carpet & Home of selling budget knockoffs of the Rug Co.'s bespoke creations. Rug Co. officials said ABC, one of the nation's largest retailers of carpets, has attempted to pass three bestselling Rug Co.

More than 2.8 million people in the U.S. paid to obtain credit cards, claim sweepstakes winnings and get in on lucrative investments that turned out to be too good to be true, officials said Tuesday as they announced hundreds of arrests in an international investigation. Authorities in five countries have arrested 565 people in fraud schemes that netted more than $1 billion.

U.S. authorities said Wednesday that they had filed a lawsuit against five online companies, including one in California, alleging they had illegally sold confidential phone records. The Federal Trade Commission said it was asking a court to bar the sale of the phone records and force the companies to give up the money they made with their operations. "Trafficking in consumers' confidential telephone records is outrageous," FTC consumer protection chief Lydia Parnes said in a statement.

More than a thousand customers didn't receive items they had ordered from a company that does business through Amazon.com Inc., forcing the massive online retailer to offer refunds. Amazon.com spokeswoman Patty Smith said Monday that the outside seller, which is listed as "Mygreatchoice," received outstanding customer ratings when it first began selling on Amazon.com in July. But Amazon.com noticed a big decline in customer satisfaction starting in late November. Seattle-based Amazon.

The founder of the credit counseling firm AmeriDebt agreed Monday to pay $35 million to settle suits filed by regulators and former customers over $172 million in allegedly hidden fees the company collected from financially strapped debtors. The money that Andris Pukke pays would go to a fund that would help reimburse the roughly 300,000 customers the Federal Trade Commission claimed that AmeriDebt Inc. deceived.

Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive! WHEN Sir Walter Scott wrote those words nearly two centuries ago, he could not have imagined how they could apply to something called the World Wide Web. The Web's complexity, global reach and de facto anonymity open the doors for anyone with imagination looking to make a buck. There are more than 63 million registered domain names, and about 1.

A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced in Buffalo to as much as seven years in prison for forgery, identity theft and falsifying business records. Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4-million civil judgment against Howard Carmack would deter other spammers.