Not even a few months after they got slapped by the Federal Trade Commission, Alyon Technologies may be at it yet again: billing at least one Maryland woman for $73.35 at $4.99 a minute, even though she closed the Alyon-produced porn popup the moment it showed up on screen during an e-mail session.
"I think they should be put out of business," said Natalie Furth to WBAL, a Baltimore-area NBC News outlet. "If not, put in jail, because it is complete fraud."
This came almost four months after Alyon won a round in court, when a federal judge in Georgia turned down a Federal Trade Commission bid for a preliminary injunction against the Lakewood, New Jersey-based billing company the FTC and several states accused of trying to squeeze money from customers who said they never used Alyon's client porn sites and services.
Furth wasn't the only Marylander to complain to WBAL in recent days about what turned out to be an Alyon popup. A 14-year-old Cartoon Network game player, Marcus Harriday, told the station that one day not long after last Christmas, he switched to the Nickelodeon Website, got a popup en route, and hit "yes" thinking it was a Nickelodeon game. He thought very wrongly, as it turned out: WBAL said the popup was an Alyon connection to a $4.99 per minute porn site, and it ended up in a $638.69 bill to his mother, Pamela.
WBAL quoted a public relations firm representing Alyon as claiming the dialups are accidental in many cases, a claim at which the FTC scoffs. "It would be highly unlikely," FTC attorney Jim Cohm told the station, "that tens of thousands of consumers would be billed without their authorization in an accidental sense."
When Pamela Harriday wrote Alyon saying the billing to her house was an error, WBAL said, the company agreed to cut "a couple of hundred dollars" from the bill but demanded the balance.
Alyon may have won a battle in federal court in Georgia, but they're not even close to winning the proverbial war. The company is still under another court order to disclose its sale terms and verify the person they're billing is in actual fact the intended user of the service, but Cohm told WBAL the complaints just keep on coming – and Alyon could be facing contempt charges if they don't knock it off.
Alyon had already been settling case by case with several other states involving very similar charges. An Alyon spokesman told AVN.com in July that much of what got them into hot water in the first place was "confusion and technical trouble a new billing technology wrings out in its first days of operation." The Georgia federal ruling suggested Alyon had no criminal intent.
YNOT programmer Jim Ruga, based on the east coast, told AVN.com the idea was to restructure the business information the Directory had collected to let Webmasters and others in the adult Internet make easier work of sorting and collecting information, making it now possible to sort listings by location criteria and business criteria.
"You can go in and say, show me sites that only deal with gay porn or with only a particular niche in the market," Ruga said. "Which is actually very helpful, since we have about eight or nine thousand porn site Webmasters, and if you're looking for people in your area who have similar types of things, it's much easier to locate them now. Before, we had kind of a hodgepodge of Webmasters and you had to do the research. Now, we've done the research for you."
YNOT plans a similar remake/remodel for its Service Directory, but Ruga would not commit to a timeframe for when that project would be finished. "It's a multiperson project," he said, "but it is in the works, and it's going to be very involved, just about as involved as (remaking) Webmaster Directory."
