: FTC says deceptive rental listings were nothing to write home about lfair September 17, 2018 | 1:03PM FTC says deceptive rental listings were nothing to write home about By Lesley Fair As the song goes, “A house is not a home.” And as alleged in an FTC lawsuit against the operators of rental listing websites , sometimes an apartment isn’t an apartment. Steven Shayan, Kevin Shayan, and affiliated companies run ApartmentHunterz.com, FeaturedRentals.com, and WeTakeSection8.com. For consumers who pay weekly or monthly subscription fees, the defendants promise accurate listings for available units. For example, ApartmentHunterz.com claims its “unique, date-sensitive, rental software updates the listings on a daily basis, so that the data you receive from us is the most accurate and up-to-date information available on the Web today.” Touting “Real-Time Vacant rental listings,” the site purports to feature “over 1,000,000 hourly updated ads” and “over 15,000 exclusive vacant and upcoming listings, giving you the ad[...]
: Clearing out our IN box wfg-adm109 January 19, 2012 | 10:29AM Clearing out our IN box By Lesley Fair We’re glad you’re visiting the BCP Business Center and thanks for your questions. Here are answers to some of your AQs . (Calling them FAQs on a site devoted to truth in advertising doesn’t seem quite right.) I’ve looked everywhere and can’t find the disclosure I’m supposed to add when companies send me products to write about on my blog. Can you tell me the magic words? No — and that’s because there are no magic words. Here’s how it works. Under the FTC’s Endorsement Guides, if there’s a connection between the marketer of the product and a person endorsing the product that would affect how people evaluate the endorsement, it should be disclosed. But no one is suggesting a mandatory “Danger Will Robinson!” neon warning box. What matters is effective communication, not legalese. A disclosure like “Company X sent me [name of product] to try, and here’s what I think about it” gives readers the information they[...]