| Volume 142 Number 97 |
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The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
If you have a car, you know how expensive the upkeep can be. Gas, maintenance, parking – the whole lot. So what if a company offered to pay you to drive around – which you were already doing – with their branding wrapped onto your car? It could sound like a good deal. Click here for more.
Visa warns that gas pump skimmers have gotten a lot more sophisticated
Using payment cards to purchase fuel at gas pumps may have gotten a little more risky. In a security alert, Visa warns that it has detected new cases of fraud in which criminals are stealing credit card data by breaking into a merchant’s network. “Skimming” card data at gas pumps has been a problem for years, but these scams have all been fairly low-tech. A criminal might replace a gas pump’s card reader with a device that captures a consumer’s payment card information, but they must return to the scene later and retrieve the device. Over the summer, Visa found that “threat actors” have stepped up their game when it comes to stealing consumers’ payment card information. Using phishing emails, the scammers target merchant employees. If one clicks on an email link, they download malware that infects the entire network. Click here for more.
Your Money
Some loans, including mortgages and commercial loans, come with a balloon payment. Whether you'll owe this type of payment depends on the type of loan you have and how quickly you start paying down the principal. Understanding how your loan is structured and what happens when a balloon payment is due is important for avoiding financial surprises as you pay it off. Click here for more.
For the Lawyers
FCC says emailed faxes are exempt from TCPA. Online fax services aren't actually sending out faxes, at least not how the Telephone Consumer Protection Act defines them, the Federal Communications Commission clarified Monday in a ruling that could have sweeping implications. That means that junk fax suits can't be aimed at companies or entities that send out such "online faxes," as long as those messages aren't delivered to a traditional fax machine, according to the FCC. "Congress did not intend the statute's prohibition to apply to faxes sent to equipment other than a telephone facsimile machine," the agency said in its four-page declaratory ruling. Because email inboxes don't operate in the same way fax machines do, the FCC found that unsolicited messages sent by online fax services don't cause the same kind of harm to consumers that the TCPA is intended to target. Click here for more.