FTC Cracks Down on Fake Tech Support Firms

Credit: Peter Cade/Iconica/Getty Images

ABC News’ Scott Goldberg reports:

The Federal Trade Commission announced a worldwide crackdown on firms running bogus technical support scams that targeted  victims in the U.S. and five other countries.

“These scam artists we’re talking about today have taken ‘scareware’ to a new level,” said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, who estimates the schemes have cost consumers “tens of millions of dollars.”

The FTC said six operations based in India posed as legitimate computer companies, such as  Microsoft or Symantec, and  convinced people to use their credit cards to pay as much as $450  to fix problems that didn’t  even exist.

So-called representatives  from the phony companies used technology to disguise their phone numbers, making it look as if they were calling from the same countries as their victims, claiming to have found  viruses on the users’ home computers.  Leibowitz said the callers would point users to a standard Microsoft warning message and claim it was a virus posing a serious threat to their computers.

The FTC said  a trustworthy computer company would never “cold call” computer users, and anyone who receives  this type of call should hang up.

Although the exact number of victims stung by these scams is not yet known,  the FTC said it received 2,400 complaints from  the U.S. alone. The callers also targeted computer users in Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the U.K..

As part of the crackdown, Leibowitz said the FTC  got a federal restraining order that froze the assets of the six operations in India, and shut down the phone numbers that were used to make the calls.

 Leibowitz emphasized that the FTC was  not a law-enforcement agency and didn’tt have the power to make arrests.

For more information visit: www.onguardonline.gov.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Release dates, subtitles finalized for Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy

Peter Jackson is now making three Hobbit films, and we've got release dates and subtitles for each one.

When news broke that Peter Jackson had convinced executives at Warner Bros. and MGM to let him film J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit as a trilogy, instead of the originally-planned duology, fans were understandably excited. A whole ‘nother film full of Jackson’s vision of Middle Earth? Another two-plus hours of Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins? A third helping of Benedict “Most British Name In History” Cumberbatch as the evil dragon Smaug? What’s not to like about all of this?

Very little, as it turns out. The ‘net is almost unanimously positive about this project (which is weird because you people hate everything), but hardcore fans have kept their excitement in check, preferring to keep the celebration to a minimum until we were granted two very crucial pieces of information about Jackson’s upcoming films: Specifically, their subtitles and an accurate release date for each film.

Fortunately, that information was revealed this morning. ComingSoon has a full report:

Warner Bros. Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures jointly announced today that the final film in Peter Jackson’s trilogy adaptation of the enduringly popular masterpiece “The Hobbit,” by J.R.R. Tolkien, now titled The Hobbit: There and Back Again, will be released worldwide on July 18, 2014. All three films in the trilogy are productions of New Line Cinema and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

The Studios also announced the title of the second installment in the franchise,The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, which will be released on December 13, 2013. The first film in the trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, opens this holiday season, on December 14, 2012. Shot in 3D 48 frames-per-second, the trilogy of films will be released in High Frame Rate (HFR) 3D, other 3D formats, IMAX and 2D.

Happy now? With this announcement you hardcore fans now have a proper, verbose title to describe whichever segment of this trilogy you’re most excited for, and we’ve discovered that the producers behind this film series are aiming for an unprecedentedly rapid release schedule. When asked to explain the move, Warner Bros. President Of Domestic Distribution Dan Fellman claimed that this whole scheme is an effort to appease the rabid Tolkien fanbase while simultaneously maximizing these films’ potential profitability. “We wanted to have a shorter gap between the second and third films of The Hobbit trilogy,” Fellman said. “Opening in July affords us not only the perfect summer tentpole, but fans will have less time to wait for the finale of this epic adventure.”

The announcement also describes the relatively recently announced third Hobbit film (now officially dubbed “The Hobbit: There And Back Again“) as “an action spectacle and an emotional conclusion for this already much-anticipated trilogy,” though it does little to explain how Jackson intends to expand what was once a duo of films into this now heavily-anticipated trilogy.

Still, we’ve got faith in the man. Peter Jackson has done more than anyone (save perhaps Tolkien himself) to popularize the Middle Earth mythology, and at this point most audiences will view whatever Jackson puts together as completely canonical. Plus, it’s not exactly like Jackson is going to have to make things up to pad out his film. Tolkien kept an obscene amount of notes and unpublished material related to the universe of The Hobbit, and one could easily fill four or five movies with that extraneous text alone. Consider this an opportunity to finally, officially admit slavering excitement for the trilogy.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Early Facebook investor Peter Thiel unloads majority of his shares

Peter Thiel, one of Facebook's biggest early investors, has sold the majority of his shares in the company, making around $400 million in the process. The move may cause further concern among other investors in the social networking site, who've seen Facebook's stock lose more than half its value since the company went public in May.

One of Facebook’s biggest early investors has sold off the majority of his shares in the company, wasting little time following the expiration of the first lock-up period last Thursday.

According to a Forbes report, Peter Thiel off-loaded 20.06 million of his roughly 25 million shares, netting him somewhere in the region of $400 million. The information was obtained from a Securities and Exchange Commission financial document.

Facebook shares have plummeted in value since the social networking giant went public in May. On Monday, their value dropped below $19, less than half of the $38 launch price.

Despite the fall, Thiel has still made a pretty penny, having invested $500,000 in Facebook in its early days back in 2004, a time when it was still called ‘Thefacebook’.

The end of the first lock-up agreement means early employees and investors holding a combined total of 271 million shares can now sell if they wish to do so, just as Thiel did.

More lock-up agreements will end between now and November, allowing for the potential sale of 1.9 billion shares. In November alone, a further 1.2 billion more shares will become eligible for sale. When that happens, things could go either way for Facebook.

“This date becomes the greatest wildcard,” Brian Wieser of Wall Street research group Pivotal told the Guardian last week. He said much will rest on the social networking site’s next lot of financial results, due in October.

“They may be able to navigate through this. The more they can convince Wall Street of the merits of their story, the more they are likely to generate demand for the shares,” Wieser added.

Concern has been growing among investors about whether the social networking site has the means to generate serious revenue from mobile advertising – an area in which it has so far been struggling to make an impact – with growing numbers of Facebook users turning to handsets and tablets to access the site.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com