Ring down below

Visual Journalism vs. Visual Advocacy

The main points of the visual journalism vs. visual advocacy by Daniel Mendez and Casey Contreras is, news stories and news development with what the news story may seem to be taking a different approach are two completely different things. The presentation clearly defines the main purpose of visual advocacy and exemplifies the meaning behind the use of visual advocacy and how it connects to visual journalism. As stated in the presentation, "Advocacy Journalism is a genre of journalism that is fact based and supports a specific point of view on an issue." The overall use of celebrity sexual assault  cases such as the R. Kelly sexual assault accusations, they were backed up with hard evidence and testimonies from the survivors involved in the case. According to a bbc news article that represents the use of visual journalism, "The #MuteRKelly campaign lobbies record label RCA to sever ties with the singer. They also target concert promoters, tickets sellers and streaming services - with Spotify, Apple Music and Pandora all agreeing to demote Kelly's songs from their playlists (a decision that is later reversed). Around the same time, the star's lawyer, publicist and personal assistant all quit - although attorney Linda Mensch said her departure was "unrelated to any allegations related to Mr Kelly's social life." Kelly continued to perform live despite protests outside his shows; and was filmed saying the campaign against him was "too late". Meanwhile, the star was sued by a former partner who said he "intentionally" infected her with a sexually transmitted disease. A representative for Kelly said he "categorically denies all claims and allegations". The star later baited his critics by releasing a song called I Admit, in which he confessed to being sexually unfaithful and documented his own experience of abuse - but denied accusations of paedophilia and operating a sex cult. "Only God can mute me," he sang defiantly. "Am I supposed to go to jail or lose my career because of your opinion?" (Savage 44).

The visual advocacy in this accusation case was the docu-series called Saving R. Kelly. The documentary helped visually document the sexual abuse accusations against R. Kelly.

Live Link to article used: R. Kelly: The history of allegations against him - BBC News (Links to an external site.)

Bait and switch: Century21 agent sued after promising an “an acre”

The buyer of a Lincoln Heights development site said he got far less than what he paid

The development lot and listing broker Salvador Almanza

In the residential real estate game, exaggeration and fluff are almost a part of an agent’s vernacular. When a home is “charming” and “cozy,” it usually means it’s tiny and claustrophobic.

And there’s the bait and switch, which is what one Lincoln Heights buyer says his broker pulled.

Jonathan Torres has filed a lawsuit against the Pico Rivera-based Century 21 Allstars brokerage and one of its agents, alleging they misrepresented the size of the development property, according to the suit.

Torres alleges that the broker, Salvador Almanza, and the seller, Ricardo Salazar, labeled the lot as 1 acre. In fact, it was roughly one quarter smaller than that, according to the suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Salazar is a defendant in the suit, along with Century 21 and Almanza.

According to the suit, Torres is “in the business of purchasing and developing real estate.”

He alleges that Almanza and Salazar led him through four lots on the Griffin Avenue spread. Among them was Lot 9-1/2, a hillside property that boasts expansive views of the city and comprises about 25 percent of the entire property.

The seller and the agent repeatedly marked the entire property — whose addresses are 3106 and 3108 Griffin Avenue — as an “acre,” both in videos marketing and walk-throughs, the suit alleges.

In November, Torres, acting behind Eastside Realty Partners LLC, went into contract to buy the “one-acre lot.” He purchased it for $1.25 million, records show, and thought he had acquired all four lots. But when he received the grant deed in the mail in February, Lot 9-1/2 was missing.

Listing broker Almanza allegedly told Torres at the time that the “seller had changed his mind,” the suit says. Almanza declined to comment.

Torres’ LLC is now suing for the lot, as well as damages and attorney fees.

Jennifer Miller, who is Torres’ attorney, did not respond to requests for comment. Century 21 also did not respond to requests for comment. Torres and Salazar could not be reached.

In February 2018, a different Century 21 Allstars agent was sued, accused of misleading a client into selling a South L.A. home for far less than it was worth.

Source: https://therealdeal.com/la/2019/04/24/bait-and-switch-century21-agent-sued-after-promising-an-an-acre/

Bait and switch: Century21 agent sued after promising an “an acre”

The buyer of a Lincoln Heights development site said he got far less than what he paid

The development lot and listing broker Salvador Almanza

In the residential real estate game, exaggeration and fluff are almost a part of an agent’s vernacular. When a home is “charming” and “cozy,” it usually means it’s tiny and claustrophobic.

And there’s the bait and switch, which is what one Lincoln Heights buyer says his broker pulled.

Jonathan Torres has filed a lawsuit against the Pico Rivera-based Century 21 Allstars brokerage and one of its agents, alleging they misrepresented the size of the development property, according to the suit.

Torres alleges that the broker, Salvador Almanza, and the seller, Ricardo Salazar, labeled the lot as 1 acre. In fact, it was roughly one quarter smaller than that, according to the suit, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court. Salazar is a defendant in the suit, along with Century 21 and Almanza.

According to the suit, Torres is “in the business of purchasing and developing real estate.”

He alleges that Almanza and Salazar led him through four lots on the Griffin Avenue spread. Among them was Lot 9-1/2, a hillside property that boasts expansive views of the city and comprises about 25 percent of the entire property.

The seller and the agent repeatedly marked the entire property — whose addresses are 3106 and 3108 Griffin Avenue — as an “acre,” both in videos marketing and walk-throughs, the suit alleges.

In November, Torres, acting behind Eastside Realty Partners LLC, went into contract to buy the “one-acre lot.” He purchased it for $1.25 million, records show, and thought he had acquired all four lots. But when he received the grant deed in the mail in February, Lot 9-1/2 was missing.

Listing broker Almanza allegedly told Torres at the time that the “seller had changed his mind,” the suit says. Almanza declined to comment.

Torres’ LLC is now suing for the lot, as well as damages and attorney fees.

Jennifer Miller, who is Torres’ attorney, did not respond to requests for comment. Century 21 also did not respond to requests for comment. Torres and Salazar could not be reached.

In February 2018, a different Century 21 Allstars agent was sued, accused of misleading a client into selling a South L.A. home for far less than it was worth.

Source: https://therealdeal.com/la/2019/04/24/bait-and-switch-century21-agent-sued-after-promising-an-an-acre/

Manufacturing MarketTrends | April 2019, Issue 1

Welcome to Foley’s new Manufacturing MarketTrends newsletter. In each edition, we will highlight key trends to watch out for in 2019, making it a year of change for manufacturers.

Know Your Supply Chain

If a company fails to know its supply chain, it can find itself getting burned in many ways, including responsibility for upstream use of forced labor or downstream sales to an export-restricted company. One of the most common ways that a company may find itself in trouble is by failing to ensure that the obligations it is undertaking in its agreements with customers are backed up by the rights it is receiving in its agreements with suppliers.

As a simplified example, if a company is warranting to its customer that products do X, Y and Z, then the company should ensure that the suppliers of its products are warranting that they do X, Y and Z. Further, if a company’s sole and exclusive remedy for a defective product from its supplier is replacement of the product or a refund of the purchase price, then the company should ensure that its agreements with customers correspondingly limit the company’s responsibility.

Even if the company’s supply chain contracts are perfectly symmetrical, if the company cannot collect from its supplier (due to the supplier’s insolvency or otherwise), then the symmetrical contracts do little good. Thus, a company must also (i) know with whom it is entering into business, (ii) ensure its supplier’s creditworthiness, and (iii) require its supplier to maintain sufficient insurance to cover the supplier’s obligations under its agreement with the company.

Section 232 and 301 Tariffs

Many manufacturing companies were heartened by the announcement that the next tranche of section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports will be delayed following further progress in the negotiations between the U.S. and China. The existing section 232 and 301 tariffs still have had a major impact on manufacturers’ profit margins. Many companies cannot meet the requirements to obtain an exclusion. The 10 percent and 25 percent tariffs have seriously impacted manufacturers across a number of industries, including many that entered into long-term agreements for the sale of goods without any right to seek adjustments or price increases following the imposition of these tariffs.

How are these additional costs and risks flowing through the supply chain where there are fixed-price, long-term supply agreements? There have been a series of consequences that have reverberated through the supply chain. In the unlikely event that the contract contains a price adjustment clause or indexing or even a “good faith” obligation to renegotiate pricing, suppliers are exercising these clauses. Where contracts do not contemplate price adjustments (most do not), suppliers may be forced to make unilateral demands for price increases under a number of theories, such as claims of force majeure or commercial impracticability. Some suppliers have threatened to stop shipping products unless the buyer will increase prices or take over responsibility for importing the goods at issue as the importer of record. If the product is critical enough to the buyer’s supply chain and cannot be obtained from an alternate source, the buyer may have no choice but to acquiesce in the relief requested by the supplier, even if it falls outside of the parties’ contract and technically is a breach of the seller’s obligation to supply goods at a fixed price.

Whether on the sell side or the buy side, it is important that the manufacturer track all additional costs incurred as a result of the tariffs, any related demands or any cost relief. There may be an opportunity at the end of the parties’ agreement to recover some of these costs or, at least, negotiate more favorable terms for any future business.

OFAC Highlights the Importance of Supply Chain Due Diligence

Regulators at the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) have sent a near seven-figure message that companies need “full-spectrum” supply chain due diligence by assessing a $996,080 penalty on a California cosmetics company, e.l.f. Cosmetics (ELF), for purchasing false eyelash kits from suppliers in China that had sourced from North Korea, in alleged violation of the North Korea Sanctions Regulations, according to OFAC.

This enforcement action highlights the risks for companies that do not conduct full-spectrum supply chain due diligence when sourcing products from overseas, particularly in a region in which North Korea, as well as other comprehensively sanctioned countries, are known to export goods. OFAC encourages companies to develop, implement, and maintain a risk-based approach to sanctions compliance and to implement processes and procedures to identify and mitigate areas of risks. Such steps could include, but are not limited to, implementing supply chain audits with country-of-origin verification, conducting mandatory OFAC sanctions training for suppliers, and routinely performing audits of suppliers.

The Departments of Treasury, State, and Homeland Security also have highlighted North Korean “deceptive practices” that put U.S. supply chains at risk of legal violations. A special advisory titled “Risks for Businesses with Supply Chain Links to North Korea” states that North Korea often sends workers abroad to earn hard currency to send back to the North Korean government. U.S. firms that purchase goods made by these workers risk significant fines and having their imports seized at the border.

As the U.S. government concludes in its advisory, “[b]usinesses should closely examine their entire supply chain(s) for North Korean laborers and goods, services, or technology, and adopt appropriate due diligence best practices.” With OFAC also maintaining strict sanctions regimes against other countries and regions, governments, and specially designated persons, any firm that relies on an international supply chain needs to incorporate the types of supply chain best practices highlighted by the advisory and by OFAC in the ELF settlement.

Market Intelligence

Additive Manufacturing. Additive manufacturing, the process of building three-dimensional structures by adding layers of material through digital design, is no longer just wishful thinking; the number of enterprise-class three-dimensional printer manufacturers has tripled to 180 since 2016. Of manufacturers surveyed, 56.9 percent reported that they either already had, or planned to deploy within the next 36 months, some form of three-dimensional printing technology.

Additive manufacturing is no longer limited to building with plastics. For example, researchers at A*Star Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology have shown that additive manufacturing techniques can make a stronger version of a high-entropy alloy, cobalt-chromium-iron-nickel-manganese, allowing lower-cost manufacture of metal parts that have greater resistance to fracturing under harsh conditions.

And the reach of additive manufacturing is quite long. Boeing announced it has used additive manufacturing techniques to build control antennae for its AMOS 17 satellite. Bugatti uses selective laser melting, a form of additive manufacturing, to help create lightweight, strong parts for the Chiron sports car. In a trial taking place in the United Kingdom, additive manufacturing is being used to manufacture a titanium port for delivering microcatheters to target a region of the brain with a naturally-occurring protein that researchers think may reverse Parkinson’s Disease.

Cybersecurity. Remaining competitive and advancing requires manufacturers to rapidly implement new technologies, though they may be slow to recognize the associated cybersecurity risks. With complex systems, devices utilizing the IoT, and increasing connectivity to the Internet and third parties, manufacturers are creating new opportunities for cyberattack.

Manufacturing is as target rich as every other industry. Manufacturers maintain intellectual property, product and manufacturing designs and specifications, employee and customer data, financial information, and a host of other valuable assets. With ransomware, manufacturers may be even more at risk given that they are considered less cybersecure – which can make them prime bait for phishing an employee, gaining access to the network or dropping ransomware seeking a large payout. Often attacks start in one system and leapfrog across the network to compromise high-value targets in another system. Numerous manufacturers have had their production operations shut down, causing a massive ripple effect throughout their supply chain due to ransomware such as Notpetya, Samsam, and WannaCry.

Manufacturers need to become more cybersecure, which may require solutions such as multifactor authentication, log analysis, password rules, training, and access controls. Manufacturers should consider retiring programs and equipment that are considered end–of-life and no longer supported, leaving them exposed to known vulnerabilities. They should focus on event detection, which is more effective than seeking “absolute protection,” including secure log aggregation and security information, event management, and continuous security monitoring. Finally, manufacturers should improve their incident response capabilities, including pre-engaging with incident response and forensic providers to help support investigations.

An effective cyber strategy may require changing operational protocols. Many traditional in-house IT departments have an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, leaving in place unpatched or unsupported systems that are highly vulnerable to attackers. Even if a manufacturer patches “all” vulnerabilities and secures “all” borders, the hackers are already on to the next vulnerability. Thus, the never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Vigilance is key!

Manufacturing: The Road Ahead

For an interactive session on managing your business’s cyber risk in the age of IoT, make plans to join Foley in Milwaukee on May 9th for our next Midwest Cyber Security Alliance meeting. For event details, contact Foley’s Midwest Cyber Security Alliance co-founder, Jennifer Rathburn.

Foley Resources

We invite you to subscribe to Foley’s Manufacturing Industry Advisor blog, which examines the latest news, developments, and trends in the manufacturing industry.

Manufacturing MarketTrends | April 2019, Issue 1 published first on https://888migrationservicesau.tumblr.com

Manufacturing MarketTrends | April 2019, Issue 1

Welcome to Foley’s new Manufacturing MarketTrends newsletter. In each edition, we will highlight key trends to watch out for in 2019, making it a year of change for manufacturers.

Know Your Supply Chain

If a company fails to know its supply chain, it can find itself getting burned in many ways, including responsibility for upstream use of forced labor or downstream sales to an export-restricted company. One of the most common ways that a company may find itself in trouble is by failing to ensure that the obligations it is undertaking in its agreements with customers are backed up by the rights it is receiving in its agreements with suppliers.

As a simplified example, if a company is warranting to its customer that products do X, Y and Z, then the company should ensure that the suppliers of its products are warranting that they do X, Y and Z. Further, if a company’s sole and exclusive remedy for a defective product from its supplier is replacement of the product or a refund of the purchase price, then the company should ensure that its agreements with customers correspondingly limit the company’s responsibility.

Even if the company’s supply chain contracts are perfectly symmetrical, if the company cannot collect from its supplier (due to the supplier’s insolvency or otherwise), then the symmetrical contracts do little good. Thus, a company must also (i) know with whom it is entering into business, (ii) ensure its supplier’s creditworthiness, and (iii) require its supplier to maintain sufficient insurance to cover the supplier’s obligations under its agreement with the company.

Section 232 and 301 Tariffs

Many manufacturing companies were heartened by the announcement that the next tranche of section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports will be delayed following further progress in the negotiations between the U.S. and China. The existing section 232 and 301 tariffs still have had a major impact on manufacturers’ profit margins. Many companies cannot meet the requirements to obtain an exclusion. The 10 percent and 25 percent tariffs have seriously impacted manufacturers across a number of industries, including many that entered into long-term agreements for the sale of goods without any right to seek adjustments or price increases following the imposition of these tariffs.

How are these additional costs and risks flowing through the supply chain where there are fixed-price, long-term supply agreements? There have been a series of consequences that have reverberated through the supply chain. In the unlikely event that the contract contains a price adjustment clause or indexing or even a “good faith” obligation to renegotiate pricing, suppliers are exercising these clauses. Where contracts do not contemplate price adjustments (most do not), suppliers may be forced to make unilateral demands for price increases under a number of theories, such as claims of force majeure or commercial impracticability. Some suppliers have threatened to stop shipping products unless the buyer will increase prices or take over responsibility for importing the goods at issue as the importer of record. If the product is critical enough to the buyer’s supply chain and cannot be obtained from an alternate source, the buyer may have no choice but to acquiesce in the relief requested by the supplier, even if it falls outside of the parties’ contract and technically is a breach of the seller’s obligation to supply goods at a fixed price.

Whether on the sell side or the buy side, it is important that the manufacturer track all additional costs incurred as a result of the tariffs, any related demands or any cost relief. There may be an opportunity at the end of the parties’ agreement to recover some of these costs or, at least, negotiate more favorable terms for any future business.

OFAC Highlights the Importance of Supply Chain Due Diligence

Regulators at the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) have sent a near seven-figure message that companies need “full-spectrum” supply chain due diligence by assessing a $996,080 penalty on a California cosmetics company, e.l.f. Cosmetics (ELF), for purchasing false eyelash kits from suppliers in China that had sourced from North Korea, in alleged violation of the North Korea Sanctions Regulations, according to OFAC.

This enforcement action highlights the risks for companies that do not conduct full-spectrum supply chain due diligence when sourcing products from overseas, particularly in a region in which North Korea, as well as other comprehensively sanctioned countries, are known to export goods. OFAC encourages companies to develop, implement, and maintain a risk-based approach to sanctions compliance and to implement processes and procedures to identify and mitigate areas of risks. Such steps could include, but are not limited to, implementing supply chain audits with country-of-origin verification, conducting mandatory OFAC sanctions training for suppliers, and routinely performing audits of suppliers.

The Departments of Treasury, State, and Homeland Security also have highlighted North Korean “deceptive practices” that put U.S. supply chains at risk of legal violations. A special advisory titled “Risks for Businesses with Supply Chain Links to North Korea” states that North Korea often sends workers abroad to earn hard currency to send back to the North Korean government. U.S. firms that purchase goods made by these workers risk significant fines and having their imports seized at the border.

As the U.S. government concludes in its advisory, “[b]usinesses should closely examine their entire supply chain(s) for North Korean laborers and goods, services, or technology, and adopt appropriate due diligence best practices.” With OFAC also maintaining strict sanctions regimes against other countries and regions, governments, and specially designated persons, any firm that relies on an international supply chain needs to incorporate the types of supply chain best practices highlighted by the advisory and by OFAC in the ELF settlement.

Market Intelligence

Additive Manufacturing. Additive manufacturing, the process of building three-dimensional structures by adding layers of material through digital design, is no longer just wishful thinking; the number of enterprise-class three-dimensional printer manufacturers has tripled to 180 since 2016. Of manufacturers surveyed, 56.9 percent reported that they either already had, or planned to deploy within the next 36 months, some form of three-dimensional printing technology.

Additive manufacturing is no longer limited to building with plastics. For example, researchers at A*Star Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology have shown that additive manufacturing techniques can make a stronger version of a high-entropy alloy, cobalt-chromium-iron-nickel-manganese, allowing lower-cost manufacture of metal parts that have greater resistance to fracturing under harsh conditions.

And the reach of additive manufacturing is quite long. Boeing announced it has used additive manufacturing techniques to build control antennae for its AMOS 17 satellite. Bugatti uses selective laser melting, a form of additive manufacturing, to help create lightweight, strong parts for the Chiron sports car. In a trial taking place in the United Kingdom, additive manufacturing is being used to manufacture a titanium port for delivering microcatheters to target a region of the brain with a naturally-occurring protein that researchers think may reverse Parkinson’s Disease.

Cybersecurity. Remaining competitive and advancing requires manufacturers to rapidly implement new technologies, though they may be slow to recognize the associated cybersecurity risks. With complex systems, devices utilizing the IoT, and increasing connectivity to the Internet and third parties, manufacturers are creating new opportunities for cyberattack.

Manufacturing is as target rich as every other industry. Manufacturers maintain intellectual property, product and manufacturing designs and specifications, employee and customer data, financial information, and a host of other valuable assets. With ransomware, manufacturers may be even more at risk given that they are considered less cybersecure – which can make them prime bait for phishing an employee, gaining access to the network or dropping ransomware seeking a large payout. Often attacks start in one system and leapfrog across the network to compromise high-value targets in another system. Numerous manufacturers have had their production operations shut down, causing a massive ripple effect throughout their supply chain due to ransomware such as Notpetya, Samsam, and WannaCry.

Manufacturers need to become more cybersecure, which may require solutions such as multifactor authentication, log analysis, password rules, training, and access controls. Manufacturers should consider retiring programs and equipment that are considered end–of-life and no longer supported, leaving them exposed to known vulnerabilities. They should focus on event detection, which is more effective than seeking “absolute protection,” including secure log aggregation and security information, event management, and continuous security monitoring. Finally, manufacturers should improve their incident response capabilities, including pre-engaging with incident response and forensic providers to help support investigations.

An effective cyber strategy may require changing operational protocols. Many traditional in-house IT departments have an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, leaving in place unpatched or unsupported systems that are highly vulnerable to attackers. Even if a manufacturer patches “all” vulnerabilities and secures “all” borders, the hackers are already on to the next vulnerability. Thus, the never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Vigilance is key!

Manufacturing: The Road Ahead

For an interactive session on managing your business’s cyber risk in the age of IoT, make plans to join Foley in Milwaukee on May 9th for our next Midwest Cyber Security Alliance meeting. For event details, contact Foley’s Midwest Cyber Security Alliance co-founder, Jennifer Rathburn.

Foley Resources

We invite you to subscribe to Foley’s Manufacturing Industry Advisor blog, which examines the latest news, developments, and trends in the manufacturing industry.

Manufacturing MarketTrends | April 2019, Issue 1 published first on https://medium.com/@888MigrationServices

Manufacturing MarketTrends | April 2019, Issue 1

Welcome to Foley’s new Manufacturing MarketTrends newsletter. In each edition, we will highlight key trends to watch out for in 2019, making it a year of change for manufacturers.

Know Your Supply Chain

If a company fails to know its supply chain, it can find itself getting burned in many ways, including responsibility for upstream use of forced labor or downstream sales to an export-restricted company. One of the most common ways that a company may find itself in trouble is by failing to ensure that the obligations it is undertaking in its agreements with customers are backed up by the rights it is receiving in its agreements with suppliers.

As a simplified example, if a company is warranting to its customer that products do X, Y and Z, then the company should ensure that the suppliers of its products are warranting that they do X, Y and Z. Further, if a company’s sole and exclusive remedy for a defective product from its supplier is replacement of the product or a refund of the purchase price, then the company should ensure that its agreements with customers correspondingly limit the company’s responsibility.

Even if the company’s supply chain contracts are perfectly symmetrical, if the company cannot collect from its supplier (due to the supplier’s insolvency or otherwise), then the symmetrical contracts do little good. Thus, a company must also (i) know with whom it is entering into business, (ii) ensure its supplier’s creditworthiness, and (iii) require its supplier to maintain sufficient insurance to cover the supplier’s obligations under its agreement with the company.

Section 232 and 301 Tariffs

Many manufacturing companies were heartened by the announcement that the next tranche of section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports will be delayed following further progress in the negotiations between the U.S. and China. The existing section 232 and 301 tariffs still have had a major impact on manufacturers’ profit margins. Many companies cannot meet the requirements to obtain an exclusion. The 10 percent and 25 percent tariffs have seriously impacted manufacturers across a number of industries, including many that entered into long-term agreements for the sale of goods without any right to seek adjustments or price increases following the imposition of these tariffs.

How are these additional costs and risks flowing through the supply chain where there are fixed-price, long-term supply agreements? There have been a series of consequences that have reverberated through the supply chain. In the unlikely event that the contract contains a price adjustment clause or indexing or even a “good faith” obligation to renegotiate pricing, suppliers are exercising these clauses. Where contracts do not contemplate price adjustments (most do not), suppliers may be forced to make unilateral demands for price increases under a number of theories, such as claims of force majeure or commercial impracticability. Some suppliers have threatened to stop shipping products unless the buyer will increase prices or take over responsibility for importing the goods at issue as the importer of record. If the product is critical enough to the buyer’s supply chain and cannot be obtained from an alternate source, the buyer may have no choice but to acquiesce in the relief requested by the supplier, even if it falls outside of the parties’ contract and technically is a breach of the seller’s obligation to supply goods at a fixed price.

Whether on the sell side or the buy side, it is important that the manufacturer track all additional costs incurred as a result of the tariffs, any related demands or any cost relief. There may be an opportunity at the end of the parties’ agreement to recover some of these costs or, at least, negotiate more favorable terms for any future business.

OFAC Highlights the Importance of Supply Chain Due Diligence

Regulators at the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) have sent a near seven-figure message that companies need “full-spectrum” supply chain due diligence by assessing a $996,080 penalty on a California cosmetics company, e.l.f. Cosmetics (ELF), for purchasing false eyelash kits from suppliers in China that had sourced from North Korea, in alleged violation of the North Korea Sanctions Regulations, according to OFAC.

This enforcement action highlights the risks for companies that do not conduct full-spectrum supply chain due diligence when sourcing products from overseas, particularly in a region in which North Korea, as well as other comprehensively sanctioned countries, are known to export goods. OFAC encourages companies to develop, implement, and maintain a risk-based approach to sanctions compliance and to implement processes and procedures to identify and mitigate areas of risks. Such steps could include, but are not limited to, implementing supply chain audits with country-of-origin verification, conducting mandatory OFAC sanctions training for suppliers, and routinely performing audits of suppliers.

The Departments of Treasury, State, and Homeland Security also have highlighted North Korean “deceptive practices” that put U.S. supply chains at risk of legal violations. A special advisory titled “Risks for Businesses with Supply Chain Links to North Korea” states that North Korea often sends workers abroad to earn hard currency to send back to the North Korean government. U.S. firms that purchase goods made by these workers risk significant fines and having their imports seized at the border.

As the U.S. government concludes in its advisory, “[b]usinesses should closely examine their entire supply chain(s) for North Korean laborers and goods, services, or technology, and adopt appropriate due diligence best practices.” With OFAC also maintaining strict sanctions regimes against other countries and regions, governments, and specially designated persons, any firm that relies on an international supply chain needs to incorporate the types of supply chain best practices highlighted by the advisory and by OFAC in the ELF settlement.

Market Intelligence

Additive Manufacturing. Additive manufacturing, the process of building three-dimensional structures by adding layers of material through digital design, is no longer just wishful thinking; the number of enterprise-class three-dimensional printer manufacturers has tripled to 180 since 2016. Of manufacturers surveyed, 56.9 percent reported that they either already had, or planned to deploy within the next 36 months, some form of three-dimensional printing technology.

Additive manufacturing is no longer limited to building with plastics. For example, researchers at A*Star Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology have shown that additive manufacturing techniques can make a stronger version of a high-entropy alloy, cobalt-chromium-iron-nickel-manganese, allowing lower-cost manufacture of metal parts that have greater resistance to fracturing under harsh conditions.

And the reach of additive manufacturing is quite long. Boeing announced it has used additive manufacturing techniques to build control antennae for its AMOS 17 satellite. Bugatti uses selective laser melting, a form of additive manufacturing, to help create lightweight, strong parts for the Chiron sports car. In a trial taking place in the United Kingdom, additive manufacturing is being used to manufacture a titanium port for delivering microcatheters to target a region of the brain with a naturally-occurring protein that researchers think may reverse Parkinson’s Disease.

Cybersecurity. Remaining competitive and advancing requires manufacturers to rapidly implement new technologies, though they may be slow to recognize the associated cybersecurity risks. With complex systems, devices utilizing the IoT, and increasing connectivity to the Internet and third parties, manufacturers are creating new opportunities for cyberattack.

Manufacturing is as target rich as every other industry. Manufacturers maintain intellectual property, product and manufacturing designs and specifications, employee and customer data, financial information, and a host of other valuable assets. With ransomware, manufacturers may be even more at risk given that they are considered less cybersecure – which can make them prime bait for phishing an employee, gaining access to the network or dropping ransomware seeking a large payout. Often attacks start in one system and leapfrog across the network to compromise high-value targets in another system. Numerous manufacturers have had their production operations shut down, causing a massive ripple effect throughout their supply chain due to ransomware such as Notpetya, Samsam, and WannaCry.

Manufacturers need to become more cybersecure, which may require solutions such as multifactor authentication, log analysis, password rules, training, and access controls. Manufacturers should consider retiring programs and equipment that are considered end–of-life and no longer supported, leaving them exposed to known vulnerabilities. They should focus on event detection, which is more effective than seeking “absolute protection,” including secure log aggregation and security information, event management, and continuous security monitoring. Finally, manufacturers should improve their incident response capabilities, including pre-engaging with incident response and forensic providers to help support investigations.

An effective cyber strategy may require changing operational protocols. Many traditional in-house IT departments have an “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality, leaving in place unpatched or unsupported systems that are highly vulnerable to attackers. Even if a manufacturer patches “all” vulnerabilities and secures “all” borders, the hackers are already on to the next vulnerability. Thus, the never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Vigilance is key!

Manufacturing: The Road Ahead

For an interactive session on managing your business’s cyber risk in the age of IoT, make plans to join Foley in Milwaukee on May 9th for our next Midwest Cyber Security Alliance meeting. For event details, contact Foley’s Midwest Cyber Security Alliance co-founder, Jennifer Rathburn.

Foley Resources

We invite you to subscribe to Foley’s Manufacturing Industry Advisor blog, which examines the latest news, developments, and trends in the manufacturing industry.

Manufacturing MarketTrends | April 2019, Issue 1 published first on http://simonconsultancypage.tumblr.com/

Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire

Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S. consumers, including DMV and arrest records, genealogy reports, phone number lookups and people searches. In an ironic twist, the marketing empire that owns the hacked online properties appears to be run by a Canadian man who’s been sued for fraud by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.

Earlier this week, a cybercriminal on a Dark Web forum posted an auction notice for access to a Web-based administrative panel for an unidentified “US Search center” that he claimed holds some four million customer records, including names, email addresses, passwords and phone numbers. The starting bid price for that auction was $800.

Several screen shots shared by the seller suggested the customers in question had all purchased subscriptions to a variety of sites that aggregate and sell public records, such as dmv.us.org, carhistory.us.org, police.us.org, and criminalrecords.us.org.

A (redacted) screen shot shared by the apparent hacker who was selling access to usernames and passwords for customers of multiple data-search Web sites.

A few hours of online sleuthing showed that these sites and dozens of others with similar names all at one time shared several toll-free phone numbers for customer support. The results returned by searching on those numbers suggests a singular reason this network of data-search Web sites changed their support numbers so frequently: They quickly became associated with online reports of fraud by angry customers.

That’s because countless people who were enticed to pay for reports generated by these services later complained that although the sites advertised access for just $1, they were soon hit with a series of much larger charges on their credit cards.

Using historic Web site registration records obtained from Domaintools.com (a former advertiser on this site), KrebsOnSecurity discovered that all of the sites linked back to two related companies — Las Vegas, Nev.-based Penguin Marketing, and Terra Marketing Group out of Alberta, Canada.

Both of these entities are owned by Jesse Willms, a man The Atlantic magazine described in an unflattering January 2014 profile as “The Dark Lord of the Internet” [not to be confused with The Dark Overlord].

Jesse Willms’ Linkedin profile.

The Atlantic pointed to a sprawling lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleged that between 2007 and 2011, Willms defrauded consumers of some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print.

“In just a few months, Willms’ companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit cards and opened new ones,” wrote The Atlantic’s Taylor Clark.

Willms’ various previous ventures reportedly extended far beyond selling access to public records. In fact, it’s likely everyone reading this story has at one time encountered an ad for one of his dodgy, bait-and-switch business schemes, The Atlantic noted:

“If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past six years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)”

In a separate lawsuit, Microsoft accused Willms’ businesses of trafficking in massive quantities of counterfeit copies of its software. Oprah Winfrey also sued a Willms-affiliated site (oprahsdietscecrets.com) for linking her to products and services she claimed she had never endorsed.

KrebsOnSecurity reached out to multiple customers whose name, email address and cleartext passwords were exposed in the screenshot shared by the Dark Web auctioneer who apparently hacked Willms’ Web sites. All three of those who responded shared roughly the same experience: They said they’d ordered reports for specific criminal background checks from the sites on the promise of a $1 risk-free fee, never found what they were looking for, and were subsequently hit by the same merchant for credit card charges ranging from $20 to $38.

I also pinged several customer support email addresses tied to the data-broker Web sites that were hacked. I received a response from a “Mike Stef,” who described himself as a Web developer for Terra Marketing Group.

Stef said the screenshots appeared to be legitimate, and that the company would investigate the matter and alert affected customers if warranted. Stef told me he doubts the company has four million customers, and that the true number was probably closer to a half million. He also insisted that the panel in question did not have access to customer credit card data.

Nevertheless, it appears from the evidence above that Willms and several others who were named in the FTC’s 2012 stipulated final judgment (PDF) are still up to their old tricks. The FTC has not yet responded to requests for comment. Nor has Mr. Willms.

I can’t help express feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude (schadenfraud?) at the victim in this hacking case. But that amusement is tempered by the reality that the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of people who got suckered into paying money to this company are quite likely to find themselves on the receiving end of additional phishing and fraud attacks (particularly credential stuffing) as a result of their data being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Terra Marketing Group’s Web developer Mike Stef responded to my inquiries from an email address at the domain “tmgbox.com.” That message was instrumental in identifying the connection to Willms and Terra Marketing/Penguin. In the interests of better informing people who might wish to become future customers of this group, I am publishing the list of the domains associated with tmgbox.com and its parent entities. This list may be updated periodically as new information surfaces.

In case it is useful for others, KrebsOnSecurity is also publishing the results of several reverse WHOIS lookups for historic domains tied to email addresses of several people Mike Stef described as “senior customer support managers” of Terra Marketing, as these also include some interesting and related (albeit mostly dead) domains.

Reverse WHOIS on Peter Graver and Jesse Willms ([email protected])

Reverse WHOIS on [email protected]

Reverse WHOIS on Jason Oster ([email protected])

Public records search domains associated with Terra Marketing Group and Penguin Marketing:

memberreportaccess.com publicrecords.us.org dmvrecords.co dmv.us.org courtrecords.us.org myfeeplan.com police.us.org warrantcheck.com myinfobill.com propertysearch.us.org homevalue.us.org carinfo2.com backgroundchecks.us.org arrestrecords.us.org propertyrecord.com criminalrecords.us.org jailinmates.us.org vehiclereportusa.com dmvinfocheck.com carrecordusa.com carhistoryindex.com autohistorychecks.com mugshots.us.org trafficticket.us.org prison.us.org reversephonelookup.us.org deathrecords.us.org deathrecord.com deathcertificates.us.org census.us.org phonelookup.us.org vehiclehistoryreports.us.org vinsearchusa.org

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/hackers-sell-access-to-bait-and-switch-empire/

Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire

Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S. consumers, including DMV and arrest records, genealogy reports, phone number lookups and people searches. In an ironic twist, the marketing empire that owns the hacked online properties appears to be run by a Canadian man who’s been sued for fraud by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.

Earlier this week, a cybercriminal on a Dark Web forum posted an auction notice for access to a Web-based administrative panel for an unidentified “US Search center” that he claimed holds some four million customer records, including names, email addresses, passwords and phone numbers. The starting bid price for that auction was $800.

Several screen shots shared by the seller suggested the customers in question had all purchased subscriptions to a variety of sites that aggregate and sell public records, such as dmv.us.org, carhistory.us.org, police.us.org, and criminalrecords.us.org.

A (redacted) screen shot shared by the apparent hacker who was selling access to usernames and passwords for customers of multiple data-search Web sites.

A few hours of online sleuthing showed that these sites and dozens of others with similar names all at one time shared several toll-free phone numbers for customer support. The results returned by searching on those numbers suggests a singular reason this network of data-search Web sites changed their support numbers so frequently: They quickly became associated with online reports of fraud by angry customers.

That’s because countless people who were enticed to pay for reports generated by these services later complained that although the sites advertised access for just $1, they were soon hit with a series of much larger charges on their credit cards.

Using historic Web site registration records obtained from Domaintools.com (a former advertiser on this site), KrebsOnSecurity discovered that all of the sites linked back to two related companies — Las Vegas, Nev.-based Penguin Marketing, and Terra Marketing Group out of Alberta, Canada.

Both of these entities are owned by Jesse Willms, a man The Atlantic magazine described in an unflattering January 2014 profile as “The Dark Lord of the Internet” [not to be confused with The Dark Overlord].

Jesse Willms’ Linkedin profile.

The Atlantic pointed to a sprawling lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleged that between 2007 and 2011, Willms defrauded consumers of some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print.

“In just a few months, Willms’ companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit cards and opened new ones,” wrote The Atlantic’s Taylor Clark.

Willms’ various previous ventures reportedly extended far beyond selling access to public records. In fact, it’s likely everyone reading this story has at one time encountered an ad for one of his dodgy, bait-and-switch business schemes, The Atlantic noted:

“If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past six years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)”

In a separate lawsuit, Microsoft accused Willms’ businesses of trafficking in massive quantities of counterfeit copies of its software. Oprah Winfrey also sued a Willms-affiliated site (oprahsdietscecrets.com) for linking her to products and services she claimed she had never endorsed.

KrebsOnSecurity reached out to multiple customers whose name, email address and cleartext passwords were exposed in the screenshot shared by the Dark Web auctioneer who apparently hacked Willms’ Web sites. All three of those who responded shared roughly the same experience: They said they’d ordered reports for specific criminal background checks from the sites on the promise of a $1 risk-free fee, never found what they were looking for, and were subsequently hit by the same merchant for credit card charges ranging from $20 to $38.

I also pinged several customer support email addresses tied to the data-broker Web sites that were hacked. I received a response from a “Mike Stef,” who described himself as a Web developer for Terra Marketing Group.

Stef said the screenshots appeared to be legitimate, and that the company would investigate the matter and alert affected customers if warranted. Stef told me he doubts the company has four million customers, and that the true number was probably closer to a half million. He also insisted that the panel in question did not have access to customer credit card data.

Nevertheless, it appears from the evidence above that Willms and several others who were named in the FTC’s 2012 stipulated final judgment (PDF) are still up to their old tricks. The FTC has not yet responded to requests for comment. Nor has Mr. Willms.

I can’t help express feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude (schadenfraud?) at the victim in this hacking case. But that amusement is tempered by the reality that the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of people who got suckered into paying money to this company are quite likely to find themselves on the receiving end of additional phishing and fraud attacks (particularly credential stuffing) as a result of their data being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Terra Marketing Group’s Web developer Mike Stef responded to my inquiries from an email address at the domain “tmgbox.com.” That message was instrumental in identifying the connection to Willms and Terra Marketing/Penguin. In the interests of better informing people who might wish to become future customers of this group, I am publishing the list of the domains associated with tmgbox.com and its parent entities. This list may be updated periodically as new information surfaces.

In case it is useful for others, KrebsOnSecurity is also publishing the results of several reverse WHOIS lookups for historic domains tied to email addresses of several people Mike Stef described as “senior customer support managers” of Terra Marketing, as these also include some interesting and related (albeit mostly dead) domains.

Reverse WHOIS on Peter Graver and Jesse Willms ([email protected])

Reverse WHOIS on [email protected]

Reverse WHOIS on Jason Oster ([email protected])

Public records search domains associated with Terra Marketing Group and Penguin Marketing:

memberreportaccess.com publicrecords.us.org dmvrecords.co dmv.us.org courtrecords.us.org myfeeplan.com police.us.org warrantcheck.com myinfobill.com propertysearch.us.org homevalue.us.org carinfo2.com backgroundchecks.us.org arrestrecords.us.org propertyrecord.com criminalrecords.us.org jailinmates.us.org vehiclereportusa.com dmvinfocheck.com carrecordusa.com carhistoryindex.com autohistorychecks.com mugshots.us.org trafficticket.us.org prison.us.org reversephonelookup.us.org deathrecords.us.org deathrecord.com deathcertificates.us.org census.us.org phonelookup.us.org vehiclehistoryreports.us.org vinsearchusa.org

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/hackers-sell-access-to-bait-and-switch-empire/

Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire

Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S. consumers, including DMV and arrest records, genealogy reports, phone number lookups and people searches. In an ironic twist, the marketing empire that owns the hacked online properties appears to be run by a Canadian man who’s been sued for fraud by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.

Earlier this week, a cybercriminal on a Dark Web forum posted an auction notice for access to a Web-based administrative panel for an unidentified “US Search center” that he claimed holds some four million customer records, including names, email addresses, passwords and phone numbers. The starting bid price for that auction was $800.

Several screen shots shared by the seller suggested the customers in question had all purchased subscriptions to a variety of sites that aggregate and sell public records, such as dmv.us.org, carhistory.us.org, police.us.org, and criminalrecords.us.org.

A (redacted) screen shot shared by the apparent hacker who was selling access to usernames and passwords for customers of multiple data-search Web sites.

A few hours of online sleuthing showed that these sites and dozens of others with similar names all at one time shared several toll-free phone numbers for customer support. The results returned by searching on those numbers suggests a singular reason this network of data-search Web sites changed their support numbers so frequently: They quickly became associated with online reports of fraud by angry customers.

That’s because countless people who were enticed to pay for reports generated by these services later complained that although the sites advertised access for just $1, they were soon hit with a series of much larger charges on their credit cards.

Using historic Web site registration records obtained from Domaintools.com (a former advertiser on this site), KrebsOnSecurity discovered that all of the sites linked back to two related companies — Las Vegas, Nev.-based Penguin Marketing, and Terra Marketing Group out of Alberta, Canada.

Both of these entities are owned by Jesse Willms, a man The Atlantic magazine described in an unflattering January 2014 profile as “The Dark Lord of the Internet” [not to be confused with The Dark Overlord].

Jesse Willms’ Linkedin profile.

The Atlantic pointed to a sprawling lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleged that between 2007 and 2011, Willms defrauded consumers of some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print.

“In just a few months, Willms’ companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit cards and opened new ones,” wrote The Atlantic’s Taylor Clark.

Willms’ various previous ventures reportedly extended far beyond selling access to public records. In fact, it’s likely everyone reading this story has at one time encountered an ad for one of his dodgy, bait-and-switch business schemes, The Atlantic noted:

“If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past six years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)”

In a separate lawsuit, Microsoft accused Willms’ businesses of trafficking in massive quantities of counterfeit copies of its software. Oprah Winfrey also sued a Willms-affiliated site (oprahsdietscecrets.com) for linking her to products and services she claimed she had never endorsed.

KrebsOnSecurity reached out to multiple customers whose name, email address and cleartext passwords were exposed in the screenshot shared by the Dark Web auctioneer who apparently hacked Willms’ Web sites. All three of those who responded shared roughly the same experience: They said they’d ordered reports for specific criminal background checks from the sites on the promise of a $1 risk-free fee, never found what they were looking for, and were subsequently hit by the same merchant for credit card charges ranging from $20 to $38.

I also pinged several customer support email addresses tied to the data-broker Web sites that were hacked. I received a response from a “Mike Stef,” who described himself as a Web developer for Terra Marketing Group.

Stef said the screenshots appeared to be legitimate, and that the company would investigate the matter and alert affected customers if warranted. Stef told me he doubts the company has four million customers, and that the true number was probably closer to a half million. He also insisted that the panel in question did not have access to customer credit card data.

Nevertheless, it appears from the evidence above that Willms and several others who were named in the FTC’s 2012 stipulated final judgment (PDF) are still up to their old tricks. The FTC has not yet responded to requests for comment. Nor has Mr. Willms.

I can’t help express feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude (schadenfraud?) at the victim in this hacking case. But that amusement is tempered by the reality that the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of people who got suckered into paying money to this company are quite likely to find themselves on the receiving end of additional phishing and fraud attacks (particularly credential stuffing) as a result of their data being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Terra Marketing Group’s Web developer Mike Stef responded to my inquiries from an email address at the domain “tmgbox.com.” That message was instrumental in identifying the connection to Willms and Terra Marketing/Penguin. In the interests of better informing people who might wish to become future customers of this group, I am publishing the list of the domains associated with tmgbox.com and its parent entities. This list may be updated periodically as new information surfaces.

In case it is useful for others, KrebsOnSecurity is also publishing the results of several reverse WHOIS lookups for historic domains tied to email addresses of several people Mike Stef described as “senior customer support managers” of Terra Marketing, as these also include some interesting and related (albeit mostly dead) domains.

Reverse WHOIS on Peter Graver and Jesse Willms ([email protected])

Reverse WHOIS on [email protected]

Reverse WHOIS on Jason Oster ([email protected])

Public records search domains associated with Terra Marketing Group and Penguin Marketing:

memberreportaccess.com publicrecords.us.org dmvrecords.co dmv.us.org courtrecords.us.org myfeeplan.com police.us.org warrantcheck.com myinfobill.com propertysearch.us.org homevalue.us.org carinfo2.com backgroundchecks.us.org arrestrecords.us.org propertyrecord.com criminalrecords.us.org jailinmates.us.org vehiclereportusa.com dmvinfocheck.com carrecordusa.com carhistoryindex.com autohistorychecks.com mugshots.us.org trafficticket.us.org prison.us.org reversephonelookup.us.org deathrecords.us.org deathrecord.com deathcertificates.us.org census.us.org phonelookup.us.org vehiclehistoryreports.us.org vinsearchusa.org

from Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/hackers-sell-access-to-bait-and-switch-empire/

Original Post from Krebs on Security Author: BrianKrebs

Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S. consumers, including DMV and arrest records, genealogy reports, phone number lookups and people searches. In an ironic twist, the marketing empire that owns the hacked online properties appears to be run by a Canadian man who’s been sued for fraud by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Microsoft and Oprah Winfrey, to name a few.

Earlier this week, a cybercriminal on a Dark Web forum posted an auction notice for access to a Web-based administrative panel for an unidentified “US Search center” that he claimed holds some four million customer records, including names, email addresses, passwords and phone numbers. The starting bid price for that auction was $800.

Several screen shots shared by the seller suggested the customers in question had all purchased subscriptions to a variety of sites that aggregate and sell public records, such as dmv.us.org, carhistory.us.org, police.us.org, and criminalrecords.us.org.

A (redacted) screen shot shared by the apparent hacker who was selling access to usernames and passwords for customers of multiple data-search Web sites.

A few hours of online sleuthing showed that these sites and dozens of others with similar names all at one time shared several toll-free phone numbers for customer support. The results returned by searching on those numbers suggests a singular reason this network of data-search Web sites changed their support numbers so frequently: They quickly became associated with online reports of fraud by angry customers.

That’s because countless people who were enticed to pay for reports generated by these services later complained that although the sites advertised access for just $1, they were soon hit with a series of much larger charges on their credit cards.

Using historic Web site registration records obtained from Domaintools.com (a former advertiser on this site), KrebsOnSecurity discovered that all of the sites linked back to two related companies — Las Vegas, Nev.-based Penguin Marketing, and Terra Marketing Group out of Alberta, Canada.

Both of these entities are owned by Jesse Willms, a man The Atlantic magazine described in an unflattering January 2014 profile as “The Dark Lord of the Internet” [not to be confused with The Dark Overlord].

Jesse Willms’ Linkedin profile.

The Atlantic pointed to a sprawling lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleged that between 2007 and 2011, Willms defrauded consumers of some $467 million by enticing them to sign up for “risk free” product trials and then billing their cards recurring fees for a litany of automatically enrolled services they hadn’t noticed in the fine print.

“In just a few months, Willms’ companies could charge a consumer hundreds of dollars like this, and making the flurry of debits stop was such a convoluted process for those ensnared by one of his schemes that some customers just canceled their credit cards and opened new ones,” wrote The Atlantic’s Taylor Clark.

Willms’ various previous ventures reportedly extended far beyond selling access to public records. In fact, it’s likely everyone reading this story has at one time encountered an ad for one of his dodgy, bait-and-switch business schemes, The Atlantic noted:

“If you’ve used the Internet at all in the past six years, your cursor has probably lingered over ads for Willms’s Web sites more times than you’d suspect. His pitches generally fit in nicely with what have become the classics of the dubious-ad genre: tropes like photos of comely newscasters alongside fake headlines such as “Shocking Diet Secrets Exposed!”; too-good-to-be-true stories of a “local mom” who “earns $629/day working from home”; clusters of text links for miracle teeth whiteners and “loopholes” entitling you to government grants; and most notorious of all, eye-grabbing animations of disappearing “belly fat” coupled with a tagline promising the same results if you follow “1 weird old trick.” (A clue: the “trick” involves typing in 16 digits and an expiration date.)”

In a separate lawsuit, Microsoft accused Willms’ businesses of trafficking in massive quantities of counterfeit copies of its software. Oprah Winfrey also sued a Willms-affiliated site (oprahsdietscecrets.com) for linking her to products and services she claimed she had never endorsed.

KrebsOnSecurity reached out to multiple customers whose name, email address and cleartext passwords were exposed in the screenshot shared by the Dark Web auctioneer who apparently hacked Willms’ Web sites. All three of those who responded shared roughly the same experience: They said they’d ordered reports for specific criminal background checks from the sites on the promise of a $1 risk-free fee, never found what they were looking for, and were subsequently hit by the same merchant for credit card charges ranging from $20 to $38.

I also pinged several customer support email addresses tied to the data-broker Web sites that were hacked. I received a response from a “Mike Stef,” who described himself as a Web developer for Terra Marketing Group.

Stef said the screenshots appeared to be legitimate, and that the company would investigate the matter and alert affected customers if warranted. Stef told me he doubts the company has four million customers, and that the true number was probably closer to a half million. He also insisted that the panel in question did not have access to customer credit card data.

Nevertheless, it appears from the evidence above that Willms and several others who were named in the FTC’s 2012 stipulated final judgment (PDF) are still up to their old tricks. The FTC has not yet responded to requests for comment. Nor has Mr. Willms.

I can’t help express feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude (schadenfraud?) at the victim in this hacking case. But that amusement is tempered by the reality that the hundreds of thousands or possibly millions of people who got suckered into paying money to this company are quite likely to find themselves on the receiving end of additional phishing and fraud attacks (particularly credential stuffing) as a result of their data being auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Terra Marketing Group’s Web developer Mike Stef responded to my inquiries from an email address at the domain “tmgbox.com.” That message was instrumental in identifying the connection to Willms and Terra Marketing/Penguin. In the interests of better informing people who might wish to become future customers of this group, I am publishing the list of the domains associated with tmgbox.com and its parent entities. This list may be updated periodically as new information surfaces.

In case it is useful for others, KrebsOnSecurity is also publishing the results of several reverse WHOIS lookups for historic domains tied to email addresses of several people Mike Stef described as “senior customer support managers” of Terra Marketing, as these also include some interesting and related (albeit mostly dead) domains.

Reverse WHOIS on Peter Graver and Jesse Willms ([email protected])

Reverse WHOIS on [email protected]

Reverse WHOIS on Jason Oster ([email protected])

Public records search domains associated with Terra Marketing Group and Penguin Marketing:

memberreportaccess.com publicrecords.us.org dmvrecords.co dmv.us.org courtrecords.us.org myfeeplan.com police.us.org warrantcheck.com myinfobill.com propertysearch.us.org homevalue.us.org carinfo2.com backgroundchecks.us.org arrestrecords.us.org propertyrecord.com criminalrecords.us.org jailinmates.us.org vehiclereportusa.com dmvinfocheck.com carrecordusa.com carhistoryindex.com autohistorychecks.com mugshots.us.org trafficticket.us.org prison.us.org reversephonelookup.us.org deathrecords.us.org deathrecord.com deathcertificates.us.org census.us.org phonelookup.us.org vehiclehistoryreports.us.org vinsearchusa.org

Go to Source Author: BrianKrebs Hackers Sell Access to Bait-and-Switch Empire Original Post from Krebs on Security Author: BrianKrebs Cybercriminals are auctioning off access to customer information stolen from an online data broker behind a dizzying array of bait-and-switch Web sites that sell access to a vast range of data on U.S.

This brokerage is accused of paying bonuses for dual-agent deals

Earlier this year, Houlihan Lawrence faced a lawsuit alleging the brokerage engaged in dual agency without proper disclosures. Now, more clients have signed on to the lawsuit. Anonymous letters sent to the firm also claim the firm pays or paid its agents bonuses for keeping deals in-house, Inman reported. “Since at least January 1, 2011, Houlihan Lawrence has operated a bait-and-switch scheme to lure thousands of homebuyers and sellers into dual-agent transactions,” plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote […]

Source: https://therealdeal.com/2018/10/03/this-brokerage-is-accused-of-paying-bonuses-for-dual-agent-deals/

Don’t Be Fooled -There’s Nothing Nice (or Smart) About the “Keep It in the Ground” Gang

Keep It Grounded In Fact (American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers)

   There’s something deceitful about the “Keep It in the Ground” gang. They’re anything but the pleasant folks they appear. They’re hard-core “useful idiots.”

Two years ago, “Keep It in the Ground” activists clashed violently with law enforcement in a futile effort to shut down construction of the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. During weeks of violent #NoDAPL protests, anti-pipeline activists shot at police; pelted them with rocks, bottles, and Molotov cocktails; and burned vehicles and construction equipment.

When the dust finally settled, more than 700 protesters (most of them from out of state) had been arrested, 48 million pounds of garbage had to be trucked away, and North Dakota’s taxpayers were on the hook for more than $40 million in expenses caused by the fierce protests.

Trash left behind by the Dakota Access pipeline protesters

The protests also resulted in a $1 billion lawsuit against Greenpeace and other “co-conspirators” filed by Energy Transfer Partners, which built the Dakota Access pipeline. ETP alleges that Greenpeace and other anti-pipeline activists “incited, funded, and facilitated crimes and acts of terrorism” against the Dakota Access pipeline, “causing enormous harm to people and property along the pipeline’s route.”

Stung by the lawsuit and chastened by new state laws that hold “critical infrastructure” protesters liable for the violence and property destruction they cause, Greenpeace and other extreme activist groups are changing their tactics.

While they are still encouraging people to fight their political battles for them, they are now targeting retirees rather than rioters and teachers instead of terrorists. The goal is to “garner media attention and keep the issue in the public eye,” according to Tzeporah Berman, a director for Stand.earth, which is working with Greenpeace to coordinate protests against the Trans Mountain pipeline at Burnaby Mountain in British Columbia.

Among the hundreds of people arrested since Greenpeace launched its campaign against Trans Mountain in early March are a 70-year-old grandfather who set up camp in a tree, a pair of septuagenarian opera singers, a retired palliative care nurse, “a 47-year-old mother and children’s book-seller,” “one of Canada’s most successful tech entrepreneurs,” an anti-poverty activist and Order of Canada recipient, and former president of the British Columbia Teacher’s Federation.

But despite their effort to recruit sympathetic, made-for-TV activists to do their protesting for them, the “Keep It in the Ground” movement is still attracting activists who stray outside the lines of civil disobedience. A “retired special education teacher” from Pennsylvania was recently sentenced to two to six months in jail after admitting to repeatedly harassing workers constructing the Mariner East 2 pipeline by “by baiting bears with meat, wafting smoke from small fires and smearing rotten eggs and cat feces on trees.”

And then there’s the Montrose 9, the self-described “peaceful” protesters who were found guilty last year of blocking construction of the Spectra Energy AIM pipeline in Montrose, NY. Among the so-called “peaceful” Montrose 9 was Mike Bucci, climate justice warrior, soup-kitchen volunteer, and campaigns coordinator for the New York chapter of Deep Green Resistance, which is “focused on dismantling industrial infrastructure,” according to its website.

While the “Keep It in the Ground” movement is obviously trying to create a sympathetic picture for the media (and the courts), their extremist ideology is exposed by their very mission: to stop the flow of oil and natural gas that makes modern life possible. Restricting pipelines won’t make oil and natural gas less essential to everything from gasoline to medical devices—but it will put additional burdens on working families already struggling to get by.

So don’t be fooled by kindly faces. Their goals are anything but altruistic.

The post Don’t Be Fooled -There’s Nothing Nice (or Smart) About the “Keep It in the Ground” Gang appeared first on Natural Gas Now.

https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/dont-be-fooled-theres-nothing-nice-or-smart-about-the-keep-it-in-the-ground-gang/

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How Trump Conquered FacebookWithout Russian Ads

It’s not every day that a former work colleague gets retweeted by the president of the United States.

Last Friday, Rob Goldman, a vice president inside Facebook’s Ads team, rather ill-advisedly published a series of tweets that seemed to confirm the Trump administration’s allegations regarding the recent indictments of 13 Russian nationals by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. To wit, the tweets said that the online advertising campaign led by the shadowy Internet Research Agency was meant to divide the American people, not influence the 2016 election.

Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Before turning to writing, he dropped out of a doctoral program in physics to work on Goldman Sachs’ credit trading desk, then joined the Silicon Valley startup world, where he founded his own startup (acquired by Twitter in 2011) and finally joined Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed the company's targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year, and his writing has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. He splits his time between a sailboat on the San Francisco Bay and a yurt in Washington’s San Juan Islands.

You’re probably skeptical of Rob’s claim, and I don’t blame you. The world looks very different to people outside the belly of Facebook’s monetization beast. But when you’re on the inside, like Rob is and like I was, and you have access to the revenue dashboards detailing every ring of the cash register, your worldview tends to follow what advertising data can and cannot tell you.

From this worldview, it's still not clear how much influence the IRA had with its Facebook ads (which, as others have pointed out, is just one small part of the huge propaganda campaign that Mueller is currently investigating). But no matter how you look at them, Russia’s Facebook ads were almost certainly less consequential than the Trump campaign’s mastery of two critical parts of the Facebook advertising infrastructure: The ads auction, and a benign-sounding but actually Orwellian product called Custom Audiences (and its diabolical little brother, Lookalike Audiences). Both of which sound incredibly dull, until you realize that the fate of our 242-year-old experiment in democracy once depended on them, and surely will again.

Like many things at Facebook, the ads auction is a version of something Google built first. As on Google, Facebook has a piece of ad real estate that it’s auctioning off, and potential advertisers submit a piece of ad creative, a targeting spec for their ideal user, and a bid for what they’re willing to pay to obtain a desired response (such as a click, a like, or a comment). Rather than simply reward that ad position to the highest bidder, though, Facebook uses a complex model that considers both the dollar value of each bid as well as how good a piece of clickbait (or view-bait, or comment-bait) the corresponding ad is. If Facebook’s model thinks your ad is 10 times more likely to engage a user than another company’s ad, then your effective bid at auction is considered 10 times higher than a company willing to pay the same dollar amount.

A canny marketer with really engaging (or outraging) content can goose their effective purchasing power at the ads auction, piggybacking on Facebook’s estimation of their clickbaitiness to win many more auctions (for the same or less money) than an unengaging competitor. That’s why, if you’ve noticed a News Feed ad that’s pulling out all the stops (via provocative stock photography or other gimcrackery) to get you to click on it, it’s partly because the advertiser is aiming to pump up their engagement levels and increase their exposure, all without paying any more money.

During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money. In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.

(Speaking of Manhattan vs. Detroit prices, there are some (very nonmetaphorical) differences in media costs across the country that also impacted Trump’s ability to reach voters. Broadly, advertising costs in rural, out-of-the-way areas are considerably less than in hotly contested, dense urban areas. As each campaign tried to mobilize its base, largely rural Trump voters were probably cheaper to reach than Clinton’s urban voters. Consider Germantown, Pa. (a Philly suburb Clinton won by a landslide) vs. Belmont County, Ohio (a rural county Trump comfortably won). Actual media costs are closely guarded secrets, but Facebook’s own advertiser tools can give us some ballpark estimates. For zip code 43950 (covering the county seat of St. Clairsville, Ohio), Facebook estimates an advertiser can show an ad to about 83 people per dollar. For zip code 19144 in the Philly suburbs, that number sinks to 50 people an ad for every dollar of ad spend. Averaged over lots of time and space, the impacts on media budgets can be sizable. Anyway …)

The Like button is our new ballot box, and democracy has been transformed into an algorithmic popularity contest.

The above auction analysis is even more true for News Feed, which is only based on engagement, with every user mired in a self-reinforcing loop of engagement, followed by optimized content, followed by more revealing engagement, then more content, ad infinitum. The candidate who can trigger that feedback loop ultimately wins. The Like button is our new ballot box, and democracy has been transformed into an algorithmic popularity contest.

But how to trigger the loop? For that, we need the machinery of targeting. (Full disclosure: I was the original product manager for Custom Audiences, and along with a team of other product managers and engineers, I launched the first versions of Facebook precision targeting in the summer of 2012, in those heady and desperate days of the IPO and sudden investor expectation.)

Despite folklore about “selling your data,” most Facebook advertisers couldn’t care less about your Likes, your drunk college photos, or your gossipy chats with a boyfriend. What advertisers want to do is find the person who left a product unpurchased in an online shopping cart, just used a loyalty card to buy diapers at Safeway, or registered as a Republican voter in Stark County, Ohio (a swing county in a swing state).

Custom Audiences lets them do that. It’s the tunnel beneath the data wall that allows the outside world into Facebook’s well-protected garden, and it’s like that by design.

Browsed for shoes and then saw them on Facebook? You’re in a Custom Audience.

Registered for an email newsletter or used your email as login somewhere? You’re in a Custom Audience.

Ordered something to a postal address known to merchants and marketers? You’re definitely in a Custom Audience.

Here’s how it works in practice:

A campaign manager takes a list of emails or other personal data for people they think will be susceptible to a certain type of messaging (e.g. people in Florida who donated money to Trump For America). They upload that spreadsheet to Facebook via the Ads Manager tool, and Facebook scours its user data, looks for users who match the uploaded spreadsheet, and turns the matches into an “Audience,” which is really just a set of Facebook users.

Facebook can also populate an audience by reading a user’s cookies—those digital fragments gathered through a user’s wanderings around the web. Half the bizarre conspiracy theories around Facebook targeting boil down to you leaving a data trail somewhere inside our consumer economy that was then uploaded via Custom Audiences. In the language of database people, there’s now a “join” between the Facebook user ID (that’s you) and this outside third-party who knows what you bought, browsed, or who you voted for (probably). That join is permanent, irrevocable, and will follow you to every screen where you’ve used Facebook.

The above is pretty rudimentary data plumbing. But only when you’ve built a Custom Audience can you build Lookalike Audiences— the most unknown, poorly understood, and yet powerful weapon in the Facebook ads arsenal.

With a mere mouse click from our hypothetical campaign manager, Facebook now searches the friends of everyone in the Custom Audience, trying to find everyone who (wait for it) “looks like” you. Using a witches’ brew of mutual engagement—probably including some mix of shared page Likes, interacting with similar News Feed or Ads content, a score used to measure your social proximity to friends—the Custom Audience is expanded to a bigger set of like-minded people. Lookalikes.

(Another way to picture it: Your social network resembles a nutrient-rich petri dish, just sitting out in the open. Custom Audiences helps mercenary marketers find that dish, and lets them plant the bacterium of a Facebook post inside it. From there, your own interaction with the meme, which is echoed in News Feed, spreads it to your immediate vicinity. Lookalike Audiences finishes the job by pushing it to the edges of your social petri dish, to everyone whose tastes and behaviors resemble yours. The net result is a network overrun by an infectious meme, dutifully placed there by an advertiser, and spread by the ads and News Feed machinery.)

We’ve all contributed to this political balkanization by self-sorting (or being sorted by Facebook) into online tribes that get morphed into filter bubbles, which are then studiously colonized by commercial memes planted and spread there by a combination of Custom and Lookalike Audiences. One of the ways the Trump campaign leveraged Lookalike Audiences was through its voter suppression campaigns among likely Clinton voters. They seeded the Audiences assembly line with content about Clinton that was engaging but dispiriting. This is one of the ways that Trump won the election, by the very tools that were originally built to help companies like Bed Bath & Beyond sell you towels.

Unsurprisingly, the Russians also apparently made use of Custom Audiences in their ads campaign. The unwary clicker on a Russian ad who then visited their propaganda site suddenly could find yet more planted content in their Feed, which could generate downstream engagement in Feed, and thus the great Facebook wheel turned. The scale of their spend was puny, however, a measly $100,000, which pales in comparison to the millions Trump spent on online advertising.

The above isn’t mere informed speculation, the Trump campaign admitted to its wide use of both Custom and Lookalike audiences. There seems to be little public coverage of whether the Clinton campaign used Facebook Ads extensively, but there’s no reason to think her campaign did not exploit the same tools.

“I always wonder why people in politics act like this stuff is so mystical,” Brad Parscale, the leader of the Trump data effort, told reporters in late 2016. “It’s the same shit we use in commercial, just has fancier names.”

He’s absolutely right. None of this is even novel: It’s merely best practice for any smart Facebook advertiser. Custom Audiences was launched almost six (!) years ago, marketed publicly at the time, and only now is becoming a mainstream talking point. The ads auction has been studied by marketers and academics for even longer. The only surprise is how surprising it can still seem to many.

If we’re going to reorient our society around Internet echo chambers, with Facebook and Twitter serving as our new Athenian agora, then we as citizens should understand how that forum gets paid for. Rarely will the owners of that now-privatized space deign to explain how they’re keeping the lights on. Plotting Russians make for a good story, and external enemies frequently serve an internal purpose, but the trail of blame often leads much closer to home. It’s right there, topped by a big, blue bar on our smartphone screens, and could very well be how you arrived at what you’re reading right now.

Update (February 27, 2018): In an unusual move, Andrew 'Boz' Bosworth, former VP of Facebook Ads, posted average CPMs for both the Clinton and Trump campaigns this afternoon. The figures are national averages over time, and while they fluctuate wildly, they mostly show the Trump campaign paying more on a CPM basis than Clinton. While interesting, and the transparency of Facebook is admirable, the data only refute the rather strong statement that Trump always and everywhere paid less. By and large, these data do not confirm or deny the hypotheses contained in this piece.

The data that Facebook needs to show us are average CPMs broken down by targeting type, action type (e.g., clicks or likes), and geography. The first two would help distinguish direct-response campaigns, which typically are precision targeted and high CPM, from more brand-style ad campaigns that are broadly targeted and low CPM. Combining the data from both styles of campaign—which broadly define the two types that advertisers undertake—can be very deceptive, and the two campaign types need to be judged separately.

Furthermore, a breakdown by geography would help determine whether another assertion made in this piece is correct: That Trump paid less to mobilize his base than Hillary. Obviously, combining data nationwide makes this very hard to figure out.

Reportedly, Facebook has asked the campaigns to be more forthcoming with data. As it's in both those campaigns' interests at this point, one can only hope they do so. As we used to say at Facebook: "Data wins arguments."

Facebook's Advertising Machine

Rob Goldman, VP of ads at Facebook, published a tweetstorm on Friday appearing to confirm the Trump administration’s allegations around the ongoing Muller investigation … and he did so without clearing his contributions with his employer.

No, Facebook isn't eavesdropping on you through your phone to better target you with ads. It doesn't have to.

To fix its toxic ad problem, Facebook will have to undergo a massive cultural shift.

Photograph by WIRED/Getty Images

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How to Lock Down Your Facebook Security and Privacy Settings

The only way to be truly secure on Facebook is to delete your account. But that's crazy talk! Here's how to lock down your privacy and security and bonus, keep targeted ads at bay.

Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-conquered-facebookwithout-russian-ads/

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Amazon EPA 1.2 MILLION

Amazon, EPA reach $1.2 million settlement over online sales of illegal pesticides

The agreement settles allegations that Amazon committed nearly 4,000 violations of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act. Some of the pesticides could be easily mistaken for sidewalk chalk, the EPA says.

Seattle-based Amazon has agreed to pay more than $1.2 million in administrative penalties as part of an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencythat the agency says will protect consumers from hazards of illegal and misbranded pesticides sold by the online retail giant. In an announcement made Thursday, the EPA said the agreement settles allegations that over the past five years Amazon committed nearly 4,000 violations of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act by allowing third-parties to sell and distribute imported pesticide products from Amazon warehouses even though the pesticides were not licensed for sale in the United States. “This agreement will dramatically reduce the online sale of illegal pesticides, which pose serious threats to public health in communities across America,” EPA Region 10 Administrator Chris Hladick said in a news statement. The penalty was one of the largest ever of its kind by the agency, said Ed Kowalski, director of the office of compliance and enforcement at EPA Region 10. While agreeing to the settlement, Amazon neither admitted nor denied the specific facts alleged by the EPA.

But as a result of the settlement, Amazon has indicated it is now “committed to closely monitoring and removing illegal pesticides from its website,” Hladick said in the agency’s press release. Amazon, in a prepared statement of its own, said regulatory compliance is a top priority at the company and that third-party sellers must comply with all relevant laws and regulations when listing items for sale on Amazon. “When sellers don’t comply with our terms, we work quickly to take action on behalf of customers,” Amazon’s statement said. “We will continue to innovate on behalf of our customers and to work with brands, manufacturers, government agencies, law enforcement, and others to protect the integrity of our marketplace.” Under the terms of the agreement, Amazon said it will develop an online training course about pesticide regulations and policies in an effort to reduce the number of illegal pesticides available through the online marketplace, the EPA said. The training — which will be mandatory for all entities planning to sell pesticides on Amazon — will be available to the public and online marketers in English, Spanish and Chinese. EPA began investigating the sale and distribution of online pesticides at the end of 2014, according to the news release. The following year, the EPA inspected an Amazon facility in Lexington, Kentucky, and inspectors in EPA’s Region 10 office successfully ordered illegal pesticides from Amazon. In August 2015, EPA issued an order to Amazon to prohibit the sale of the illegal pesticide products, including some that the regulatory agency said could be mistaken for blackboard or sidewalk chalk by children. Another “Stop Sale Order” against Amazon was issued in January 2016 after the agency discovered that unregistered or misbranded insecticide bait products were also being offered for sale. “Amazon immediately removed the products from the marketplace, prohibited foreign sellers from selling pesticides, and cooperated with EPA during its subsequent investigation,” the agency said in its news statement. “The orders, as well as EPA’s subsequent engagement with the company, prompted Amazon to more aggressively monitor its website for illegal pesticides. As a result, Amazon has created a robust compliance program comprised of a sophisticated computer-based screening system backed-up by numerous, trained staff.” In October 2016, Amazon notified customers who had purchased the illegal pesticides between 2013 and 2016 about the safety concerns with these products and urged disposal. Amazon also refunded approximately $130,000 to those customers. EPA managers cautioned that many more illegal pesticides are surely in commerce online, and that customers should check for the EPA registration label on any product they buy. Another clue is a product name in fractured or nonstandard English. Names on the illegal products that were the subject of the settlement include “Green Leaf Powder Fly Killing Bait” and “Cockroach Cockroaches Bugs Ants Roach Kills Chalk.” Any customer who has purchased the products should stop using them immediately as the products, which attack the nervouse system, can cause illness and even death, particulalry for children. Dispose of the products in the trash, and do not flush in a toilet or put in the drain. Don’t open the package, and handle it with disposable gloves. Call the National Pesticide Information Center at 1-800-858-7378 for more information. The enforcement action came even as EPA continues to frustrate many consumer and public health advocates on pesticide safety, most recently by reversing direction on banning chlorpyrifos, a pesticide, from being sprayed on food. The EPA’s own scientists concluded that ingesting even tiny amounts of the chemical can interfere with the brain development of fetuses and infants. EPA Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt canceled the ban on chlorpyrifos, ordered during the Obama administration, shortly after his appointment by President Trump. Thursday’s enforcement action against Amazon targeted pesticides already illegal to sell in the U.S. EPA said investigation into the illegal products started with summer interns in the national office, searching the internet for unregistered pesticides offered by online retailers. Because of the enormous shift from brick-and-mortar retailers to online commerce, “This is a very difficult avenue of pesticides sales to get our hands around,” said Chad Schulze, EPA Region 10 Pesticide Enforcement Team Lead. Asked how much illegal pesticide product he believes is still out there, he answered “a lot.” “… that is why we wanted to take a strong stance on this,” Schulze said. The packages involved in the sale were small, and therefore the total poundage of product that made its way into customers hands and homes is not large, Schulze said. However the toxicity of the illegal products and possible appeal to children make them especially dangerous. The chalk products are used to draw a pesticide-laden barrier on a surface the user does not want an insect to cross and survive. Arriving in bright, cheery and easily opened packaging, the products look almost like sidewalk chalk, toys or even candy. Any child could easily open and play with them. “A kid could get it in the mail, open it up, and have a large exposure,” Schulze said. “The risk is very real.”

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