In August 2000, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against the owners of playgirl.com and 64 affiliated corporations running dozens of similar sites. The "Free Tour Web Sites" claimed that visitors’ credit card numbers were required solely to prove that the visitors were of legal age to view the adult material, and stated that the credit cards would not be billed. Visitors complained, however, that their cards were billed despite the representations, and other consumers were billed even though they did not visit the web sites.
Those who tried to dispute the charges were met with a variety of barriers designed by the site owners to thwart their efforts. According to the FTC, the site owners used billing names different than the names of the web sites, so consumers often had no idea who was billing them or why - and contacting those behind the billing names proved very difficult.
The settlement bars the illegal practices in the future, and requires that those behind the scams post a bond – set at $2 million for the corporations and $500,000 each for the individuals before they are allowed to continue to market adult entertainment on the internet.