Enforcement
We enforce federal competition and consumer protection laws that prevent anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices.
,
Search or browse
the Legal Library
Find legal resources and guidance to understand your business responsibilities and comply with the law.
,
Take action
- Report an antitrust violation
- File adjudicative documents
- Find banned debt collectors
- View competition guidance
,
Competition Matters,
,
Policy
We work to advance government policies that protect consumers and promote competition.
,
Search or browse
the Legal Library
Find legal resources and guidance to understand your business responsibilities and comply with the law.
,
Take action
,
Technology Blog,
The Office of Technology,
,
Advice and Guidance
Learn more about your rights as a consumer and how to spot and avoid scams. Find the resources you need to understand how consumer protection law impacts your business.
,
Take action
- Report fraud
- Report identity theft
- Register for Do Not Call
- Sign up for consumer alerts
- Get Business Blog updates
- Get your free credit report
- Find refund cases
- Order bulk publications
,
Consumer Advice
- Shopping and Donating
- Credit, Loans, and Debt
- Jobs and Making Money
- Unwanted Calls, Emails, and Texts
- Identity Theft and Online Security
- Scams
,
Business Guidance
- Advertising and Marketing
- Credit and Finance
- Privacy and Security
- By Industry
- For Small Businesses
- Browse Business Guidance Resources
- Business Blog
,
Servicemembers:
Your tool for financial readiness
,
Get consumer protection basics, plain and simple
,
Learn how the FTC protects free enterprise and consumers
,
Looking for competition guidance?
,
News and Events
,
,
–
,
Follow us on social media
,
About the FTC
Our mission is protecting consumers and competition by preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, and unfair business practices through law enforcement, advocacy, and education without unduly burdening legitimate business activity.
,
Looking for legal documents or records? Search the Legal Library instead.
,
Looking for legal documents or records? Search the Legal Library instead.
,
For Release,
FTC also releases paper on evolution of technologist expertise at agency,
,
The Federal Trade Commission and other member agencies of the International Competition Network (ICN) jointly issued a statement about how regulatory agencies can increase their tech capacity to keep pace with the increasing use of technology across industries.
The joint statement grew out of a first-ever Technology Forum convened March 25-26 in Washington DC by competition and consumer protection authorities who participate in the ICN and hosted by the FTC.
Separately, a number of U.S. federal and state agencies, including the FTC, also released agency-specific action statements today on tech capacity. These statements reflect concrete actions to increase tech capacity, including actively hiring technologists, which will help the agencies enforce existing laws and design remedies that work for consumers, workers, small businesses, and others.
The FTC also released a new staff report today that details the evolution of the agency’s work to expand its technological expertise and how the agency’s Office of Technology, created in early 2023, applies its subject matter expertise to assisting the agency’s enforcement and regulatory work.
A Joint Statement on Increasing Tech Capacity in Law Enforcement Agencies Around the World
The joint statement recognizes that the increasing digitization of economies around the world require a greater level of expertise in order to assess the behavior of companies and the ability to weigh potential benefits and risks of technology. The statement notes that integrating technological expertise in competition and consumer protection enforcement work can help ensure timely intervention to tackle problems at their inception. This includes detecting consumer harms or anticompetitive conduct, targeting unlawful practices before they are widely adopted, or assessing market conditions that could lead markets to tip. This can help limit harms, promote greater competition and innovation, and save time and resources over the long term.
The joint statement also calls for building interdisciplinary technological expertise by hiring roles across software and hardware engineering, product design and user experience, data science, investigative and user research, expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence, ad tech and others. Lastly, the participants called for building on this year’s ICN Technology Forum through continued engagement and cross fertilization of ideas and best practices.
The lead staffers on these matters include Noam Kantor, Amritha Jayanti, and Stephanie Nguyen in the Office of Technology and Paul O’Brien and Maria Coppola in the Office of International Affairs.
,
The Federal Trade Commission works to promote competition, and protect and educate consumers. The FTC will never demand money, make threats, tell you to transfer money, or promise you a prize. You can learn more about consumer topics and report scams, fraud, and bad business practices online at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. Follow the FTC on social media, read our blogs and subscribe to press releases for the latest FTC news and resources.
,
Office of Public Affairs,
202-326-2924
