Retail sales have seen a surge on Cyber Monday (December 1) with an increase of 8.5% over last year, resulting in the “largest online shopping day” so far in 2014.1 E-shopping continued its climb, as online sales during Thanksgiving weekend grew by 17% over last year.2 Amazon, the largest U.S. online retailer,3 shipped an estimated…
Category: Blog Articles
Protecting Prepaid Products: The CFPB’s Latest Rule Proposal
Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed a new rule regarding consumer protections and disclosures in the prepaid debit card industry. The rule would help bring the prepaid card industry under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act and Truth In Lending Act while also providing a disclosure mechanism to help consumers when they are…
Equity Crowdfunding and the JOBS Act
Crowdfunding is “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising many small amounts of money from a large number of people, typically via the Internet.1 When many people hear the word “crowdfunding,” they think of reward-based crowdfunding, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, and people across the globe pledging money to fund cool projects like…
Code of Conduct: Oracle v. Google
What is copyrightable code? Google and Oracle are in a battle to answer this question. The issue is over Google’s use of Oracle’s Application-programming interface (API). An API is a software-to-software interface that allows different applications to communicate with one another.1 The fact that users can copy text from a Mozilla browser to a Microsoft…
Challenging “Too Big to Fail” Designation
The widening scope of the Financial Stability Oversight Council’s “too big to fail” designations has caused alarm in the financial sector and, in the case of MetLife, inspired legal action. In response to the 2008 global financial crisis, Congress formed the Financial Stability Oversight Council (“FSOC”) as part of the reforms initiated by the 2010…
The SEC – Catching up to the Clawback
In response to the major accounting frauds in the early 2000s, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act required chief executives and chief financial officers to affirm the accuracy of their books.1 In practice, this relevant portion of the Act sought to eliminate the temptation among executives to misstate their companies’ financial positions, which made the company look better…
FINRA Arbitration: Still Room for Improvement
Those in favor of out of court alternative dispute mechanisms may look at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s (FINRA) track record of arbitration as a move in the positive direction to bypass the congested court system to hasten resolution of securities disputes. Though this may be the story that a facial glance at the issue…
Testing Sarbanes-Oxley: The American Realty Capital Properties Scandal
American Realty Capital Properties’ stock price plunged nearly 20% on October 29th after the company disclosed that it had intentionally left mistakes in its financial statement uncorrected. 1 By November 3rd, less than a week later, American Realty Capital Properties’ shares had plummeted nearly 37% since the announcement. 2 According to Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell, an independent…
Think Before You Snap
Snapchat is a photo messaging system that consumers download as an application to their smart phone or device to send messages through photographs, videos, or text that the original sender can edit and determine the length of time the message can be viewed to recipients.1 The application is marketed to consumers to ensure that once…
Spoofing: The Newest White Collar Crime
A day after Halloween, federal prosecutors spooked traders nationwide. In the first criminal prosecution of its kind, Michael Coscia was charged with spoofing.1 The indictment claims that he manipulated the futures market through two computer programs that he designed.2 Mr. Coscia is a high frequency trader, and the prosecution comes at a time when authorities…