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Adult Sites: $188 Mill. Fraud
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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!”
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