TL;DR Circle K’s parent company, Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. (ACT), tried to buy 270 gas stations from Giant Eagle in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The Federal Trade Commission filed a formal complaint on June 25, 2025, charging the deal would illegally…
Antitrust Abuse • Corporate Monopoly • Consumer Markets The Plot to Monopolize Glue Henkel and Loctite tried to swallow Liquid Nails whole. The FTC caught them with their hands in the tube. Published December 2025 • Source: FTC Complaint filed…
TL;DR Gateway Services, the single largest pet cremation company in the United States, locked 1,780 workers into illegal non-compete agreements that barred them from working anywhere in the pet cremation industry for a full year after leaving. These contracts covered…
TL;DR Kubota North America Corporation slapped “Made in USA” labels on products that contained wholly-imported replacement parts, deceiving American consumers and farmers who paid a premium for domestic goods. The Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice took…
TL;DR A network of six shell companies and their owners ran a multi-year scheme to charge Americans $9.99–$14.99 per month for text message subscriptions they never signed up for. The operation generated over $62 million (enough to fully fund a…
TL;DR A California tech-support company called NTS IT Care, Inc., run by Jagmeet Singh Virk, ran fake pop-up scams that impersonated Microsoft and Apple to terrify people into paying for fake “virus removal.” The FTC sued and won: courts imposed…
TL;DR Illuminate Education, a company that sold data tools to thousands of K-12 schools, failed to protect the sensitive personal data of more than 10 million children, and the Federal Trade Commission came after them for it. The data Illuminate…
TL;DR Two of the most powerful engineering software companies on Earth, Synopsys and ANSYS, agreed to merge in January 2024, a deal that would have concentrated dominant control over the tools that design virtually every semiconductor chip and physical simulation…
FTC Enforcement Action • April 2023 • Payment Fraud Nexway’s $16.5 Million Fine: How Payment Laundering Fueled a Tech-Support Scam A payment processor knew fraudsters were terrifying ordinary people into handing over their credit cards. The company processed the charges…
TL;DR CRI Genetics earned $42.8 million (enough to pay a year’s rent for over 1,100 families) between 2017 and 2021 selling DNA tests it falsely claimed were “99.9% accurate” and backed by a “patented algorithm”. Just one smol problem tho:…