January 2022
Volume 15 | Issue 1
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Happy New Year!

It’s a new year—a time for Team Sentinel to reflect on the past and to plan for the future.  We’ve accomplished a great deal this winter: overhauling the registration site, updating the Help Resources within Sentinel, and making various technical improvements behind the scenes.  On the international front, we have added Portuguese as an additional language to econsumer.gov, which gathers and shares cross-border e-commerce complaints.  It also permits econsumer complaint access to international agencies, the latest of which are the Brazilian and Polish consumer protection authorities. We hope that our Sentinel innovations aid your work in the new year.

The Consumer Response Center at 25

The Consumer Response Center is the FTC’s complaint collection program and will turn 25 next month.  The CRC preceded Sentinel and is the sine qua non of complaint collection, always meeting the annual challenge of processing increasing numbers of consumer complaints.  In its first fiscal year of operation, the CRC processed over 100,000 complaints in a year; today, it can process that volume within two weeks.  Happy birthday, CRC!

Five Sentinel Success Stories

We are thrilled to hear law enforcement success stories resulting from Sentinel complaints.  Here are five recent ones:

Two Peruvian nationals pleaded guilty to defrauding thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants in the U.S.

Three Vietnamese residents were enjoined from operating a pandemic-related fraud scheme

The FTC and DOJ obtained a ban on negative option marketing and $21 million for consumers deceived by the background report provider MyLife

The FTC settled with a group of phantom debt collectors in South Carolina who took in $12 million and claimed people were going to be arrested if they did not pay debts they did not owe

The FTC is returning over $10 million to consumers who paid hidden fees to the online lender LendingClub  

In the Spotlight

Sentinel Data shows a major increase in gift cards as a scam payment method.  According to the FTC’s latest Data Spotlight, in the first nine months of 2021, consumers reported losing $148 million in scams where gift cards were used as the form of payment.  That amount is more than consumers reported in all of 2020.

DNC Biennial Report

The Federal Trade Commission issued its biennial report to Congress on the National Do Not Call Registry. The new report details the number of consumers – now totaling more than 244 million – who have placed their telephone numbers on the Registry over the past two years. It also states the FTC received more than five million Do Not Call complaints in fiscal year (FY) 2021, with people overwhelmingly reporting that these violations came via robocalls as opposed to live telemarketing.

Pandemic Fraud Updates

The FTC has released an analysis that found COVID-19 fraud and deception to be prevalent on social media platforms. The FTC said the pandemic has created a breeding ground for this type of fraud.  It also warns against fake COVID tests and common health scams.