Choicepoint, who lost hundreds of thousands of data records to scammers, and was rewarded for their ineptitude with some big government contracts, has settled with the FTC to the tune of $15 million. $10 million is a fine (that the government body will invariably lose itself), and the rest goes into a “victims fund.”
Of course the actual number of “victims” is yet to be determined – they are still coming out of the woodwork, and unless everyone on the list changes all their credit card numbers, they still will be for a long time.
Robert K. Brown’s blog has a running list of commentors complaining about getting hit with fraudulent charges. The list keeps on growing. Brown thinks the settlement should have been more like $50 million, but Choicepoint likely didn’t have that kind of money to spend after paying all those lobbyists.