Playgirl.com and other adult entertainment Web sites will pay $30 million to settle charges that they illegally billed thousands of consumers for “free” services and other consumers who never visited the Web sites.
Last summer, the Federal Trade Commission and the New York Attorney General filed suit in U.S. District Court naming New York-based Crescent Publishing Group Inc., its principals, Bruce Chew and David Bernstein, and 64 affiliated corporations that operate adult entertainment Web sites, the FTC said in a statement.
According to the complaint, the defendants operated scores of adult entertainment Web sites, deceptively promoting them as “free.” The “free” sites claimed that consumers’ credit card numbers were required solely to prove the legal age of the consumers to view the adult material, and that the credit cards would not be billed, the FTC said.
Consumers said that their cards were charged recurring monthly membership fees ranging from $20 to $90, the FTC said.
Consumers often had no idea who was billing them or why because the defendants used billing names different than the names of the Web sites. And consumers often had difficulty contacting the defendants to get refunds from the information provided to them on their billing statement, the FTC said.
The settlement requires that the defendants post a bond–$2 million for the corporate defendants and $500,000 each for the individual defendants–before they are allowed to continue to market adult entertainment on the Internet, the FTC said.
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