Cyber Crimes: The Nightmare Scenario for Your Business
Your company could sustain huge losses due to the compromise of an employee e-mail account. Seemingly legitimate communications and requests may actually be signs of a fraudster attempting to commit a scam called Business E-Mail Compromise (BEC).
How does this scam work? The goal of this type of scam is to compromise business e-mail accounts and trick employees or other individuals into wiring...
Blacklisted By Freddie Mac: How a Short Sale Can Mean a Long Road to Redemption for Real Estate Professionals
Hollywood. Railroads. Mining. You may have thought blacklisting was a forsaken part of America’s past, but if you’re reading this, you may be a victim of this devastating tool. Used by some of the largest and most influential institutions, blacklisting is alive and well, now cloaked in new terms and greater secrecy.
Birth of the Subprime Market.
2008 is an infamous year that still engenders...
WHEN WALL STREET COLD CALLS YOU
You see it in movies — an image of slick stock broker in a basement boiler room in Manhattan, Brooklyn or Staten Island cold calling customers. The pitch is standardized. The broker has a secret stock or IPO just for you (the innocent investor), but the catch is you have to act now because the opportunity won’t last and there is a limit to how much you can buy. The broker gains your...
FAQ: Salesperson Pay
Dealers must be careful about violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act. These actions can be filed either as individual actions or as group actions in federal court, and they can be lucrative for plaintiffs’ law firms. In fact, there are law firms springing up around the country that do nothing but FLSA work on behalf of employees. Here are three questions regularly asked with respect to...
Financial Alphabet Soup is Really Not That Filling
Financial professionals often use certifications on business cards, internet portals, and the like to support their expertise. Whether it is CFP (Certified Financial Planner), CSNA (Certified Special Needs Advisor), or CSP (Certified Succession Planner), the abbreviations suggest a course of study, a test, or a series of tests successfully passed. But is this financial alphabet soup of...
FTC Looking at Dealers for Safeguards Rule Compliance
On June 7, 2012, the FTC announced that it had agreed on terms of a consent order with a Georgia Toyota dealer stemming from the dealer’s failure to maintain adequate control of its customer information as required by the FTC Safeguards Rule. The FTC charged that the dealer had violated its Safeguards obligations by having peer-to-peer (P2P) software onto its computer system. The effect of...
Make the Case Against Dealer Flat Fees
Have you wondered why industry publications are writing with increasing frequency about the expected demise of finance “markup”? The answer is simple – proponents of dealer flat fees are working to sell the concept that “markups” are evil to regulators like the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission with the hope that they will take action. So what...