Adult Sites: $188 Mill. Fraud

Adult pay site owner Alexus Winston smiles, but The FTC has filed a lawsuit against the business she represent...

American nude model Alexus Winston have been described as “totally yummy…” Her road to porn began when she meet, as so many other women, photographer Suze Randall. 

Since then she have been featured in most skin magazines from High Society to Penthouse. She also has web site, her second, but is it worth the pain? Will she steal our money?

At first glance maybe not. We are offered access for “only” $2,95. Just fire up your VISA card! Too good to be true? You might wonder when her partner-in-crime, CCBills, state with small to invisible print that you will be automatically charged a additional fee of $ 29,95 the next month “for your convenience…”

My convenience is to give me just what I am signing up for. Anything else is fraud. How can we prevent the web site for ripping off our bank accounts for years? There is no way to contact Alexus by mail. CCBills says that we should not contact them, they just collect the money. On direct question CCBills refuse to answer. And it was not possible to contact Alexus Winston. That is certainly convenient...

Alexus Winston just lost one paying customer.

The situation is much more complex than one customer lost:  
The Federal Trade Commission and New York attorney general filed a lawsuit 23 August against Playgirl.com, Highsociety.com and dozens of other adult content Web sites for allegedly billing consumers for services that were offered as free.

The adult web site operators collected $188 million from 1997 to 1999, some of which may have been obtained fraudulently. The credit card billings allegedly generated "tens of thousands" of complaints.

Owners of scores of adult Web sites have been charged with billing thousands of Web users for supposedly free services, and billing other consumers who have never visited the Web sites at all, the Federal Trade Commission announced.

"We've examined the digital adult content industry for a year and determined that there was an unacceptably high incidence of disputes about transactions," said American Express spokeswoman Joanne Fisher. American Express will no longer cover credit card transactions from porn sites.

VisaUSA says this is one of the top two or three complaints that they've ever had, and that they have thrown porn sites out of the VisaUSA system. "This is probably the biggest Internet scam I've ever seen," says Steve Baker, director of the Federal Trade Commission's Midwest region.

According to the complaint, the "Free Tours" generated income of $188 million between 1997 and 1999 - $141 million of which was generated in the first 10 months of 1999 alone. The FTC said the defendants operate the Web sites and promote them as free, saying that consumers' credit card numbers are required solely to prove that the visitors are of legal age to view the material - a common practice on adult Web sites. The sites say that the credit cards will not be billed, but thousands of customers were charged monthly membership fees from $20 to $90, the FTC said.

“I never saw any terms or conditions regarding how to become a paying member of the site,” one consumer stated to the commission in the complaint brief. "During my time on the Web site, I never thought that the free tour had ended or that my credit card would be billed for visiting the site.”

In the complaint, the FTC cited one consumer who visited Highsociety.com and had no idea why he received five subsequent $49.95 withdrawals from his checking account by companies named Split Back, Romulust, and Arachne. The corporations, 65 in all, were all owned by Chew and have the same business address, the FTC said. Also, the consumers had difficulty contacting the defendants.

The suit also claims that the company rarely provided telephone numbers that consumers could call to question the charges. When the company listed numbers, the line would be busy or no one would answer.

“Be aware,” writes one comment on Cnet news, “any time you see a “special trial offer” at a low cost, watch out! People should be aware its not just the porn folks playing this game. Webhosting providers, search engine submitters, and others have been known to play the same game. Watch your credit card statements and never ever used a “bank debit card” online.

Counting tax frauds and including transactions to foreign web sites, the overall fraud is much like five to ten times bigger. The term porn mafia is quite accurate.

“You know deep down inside you that this (the porn) industry is not recognized as a legitimate industry," writes one insider on Luke Ford’s website. Old time nude photographer Ron Harris admits on his web site that "The recent drops in crime rates are not because of any new groundbreaking get tough on crime legislation, even though that is what our politicians would like you to think. Crime is down because the economy is booming, and it seems like most of yesterday felons found work in e-porn.”

The adult pay sites are in bad need of a third party trust validation; something in the line of a disclaimer that can state that “No, we are not criminals like the rest!”