Via Instapundit, the New York Times has an article on the the high cost of a “free credit report” from FreeCreditReport.conm. This site is not to be confused with AnnualCreditReport.com, the one site where you really can get a free credit report. Except that it is to be confused with that site. That’s the whole point of calling the not-so-free site “FreeCreditReport.com.”

Now, I’m sure some of you armchair lawyers (and maybe even one or two real ones) will come back and say “But Xrlq, the statement is true, at least technically. You can get a free credit report from FreeCreditReport.con … er, I mean, com. All you have to do is sign up for a worthless service no one in his right mind would want, wait until your ‘free’ credit report arrives, and then call an AOL-esque ‘you don’t really want to cancel this valuable service, do you?’ maze to finally cancel the worthless service you never wanted in the first place, all to obtain a credit report you really could have gotten free from the site they hoped you’d confuse them with.” To which I say hogwash. Having to go through the trouble of canceling a service you never wanted in the first place is a cost, and correspondingly, a huge value to Experian for running the scam. That’s why they do it. The whole point of FreeCreditReport.con is to give away credit reports that are not free, while trusting that a significant portion of their victims will end up shelling out real dollars in the end. In other words, for those of us dinosaurs old enough to remember Joe Isuzu, the entire business model of FreeCreditReport.con is Joe Isuzu, minus the funny. [OK, maybe you think a Yugo, a pirate suit and a series of annoying songs are "funny," but that's beside the point. There's nothing humorous about calling a service "free" when it isn't, especially when done to con people out of using the site where they really could get that same service for free.]

Ah, you say, but the fact that you have to sign up for this not-free service is buried in the mice-print somewhere, so at worst, that makes the ad merely misleading and not, strictly speaking, false. Surely there’s no law against that, right? Wrong. 15 U.S.C. 55(a) defines a “false advertisement” as:

an advertisement, other than labeling, which is misleading in a material respect; and in determining whether any advertisement is misleading, there shall be taken into account (among other things) not only representations made or suggested by statement, word, design, device, sound, or any combination thereof, but also the extent to which the advertisement fails to reveal facts material in the light of such representations or material with respect to consequences which may result from the use of the commodity to which the advertisement relates under the conditions prescribed in said advertisement, or under such conditions as are customary or usual. No advertisement of a drug shall be deemed to be false if it is disseminated only to members of the medical profession, contains no false representation of a material fact, and includes, or is accompanied in each instance by truthful disclosure of, the formula showing quantitatively each ingredient of such drug.
[Emphasis added.]

Note that the basic rule of false advertising is that the statements made be misleading, not that they be false. Nearly everything Joe Isuzu said in the advertisements (including his name) was false, but the ads were not “false advertisements” because they were obvious jokes, not statements likely to mislead anyone with a high enough IQ to be able to afford an Isuzu. The only situation in which literal falsehood is even relevant to the analysis is the limited exception for drug advertisements, and then only when they are disseminated only to members of the medical profession and certain other stated criteria are met. In any other situation, even if one were to take the position that an ad like this

Call now for three free ounces of cocaine!!!!!!

Offer void were prohibited by law.

is technically “true,” it would clearly be a false advertisement for purposes of federal law. And so too is an ad for “free credit reports” coupled with a mice-print disclaimer to the effect that the product they are actually selling is neither a credit report, nor free.

As a conservative, liberatarian-leaning Republican, I’m generally among the last to scream “their oughta be a law” about anything. But in cases like this, where the fraudulent intent is clear, and where there already is a law, a little enforcement might be worth considering. And yes, that goes for you, too, Apple. Do you really think anyone would “buy” those things if you disclosed the fact that you are retaining ultimate control over a product they thought they had just bought and therefore was now their property rather than yours?