The Federal Court of Australia has ordered the operator of online retailer Snaffle to pay $21.7 million (AUD 33.5 million) in penalties after finding the company unlawfully overcharged tens of thousands of consumers through its credit contracts.
The Federal Trade Commission has officially begun enforcing the Take It Down Act, setting a start of a new federal requirement forcing online platforms to remove nonconsensual intimate images within 48 hours of receiving a valid request from victims.
Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, known as UOKiK, said Thursday it had imposed a nearly $2.17 million (PLN 8.45 million) fine against Beliani after the company allegedly failed to cooperate with an ongoing investigation into its online sales practices.
The Australian Federal Court case against Coles Supermarkets Australia was, on paper, about supermarket shelf pricing. In practice, it became something larger and more uncomfortable for corporate compliance teams. Because once a company trains consumers to trust a label, a slogan, or a pricing program, the legal question is no longer just what the numbers technically say. It becomes whether the overall impression being created can survive scrutiny.
The Federal Trade Commission has announced a $35 million settlement with Shutterstock, accusing the online licensing platform of quietly locking consumers into recurring charges while making it unnecessarily difficult to cancel subscriptions.
The fine that caught people's attention $78 million (PLN 339 million), split between an agricultural machinery company and the executives who ran it) wasn't the largest UOKiK imposed last year. It wasn't even close. But it was, in its way, the most instructive. Because the executives didn't argue they'd ordered the conduct. They argued they hadn't known about it. The court wasn't moved.
Federal authorities have secured one of the largest False Claims Act settlements tied to customs duty evasion after a group of California aluminum companies agreed to pay $549.5 million to resolve allegations they improperly avoided tariffs on imports from China for years by disguising aluminum extrusions as ordinary shipping pallets.