An Orange County businessman who operated an eBay-related scam that nabbed $45 million from more than 500,000 consumers nationwide learned his fate this week inside the Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse in Santa Ana.
Charles Gugliuzza, the onetime president of Commerce Planet, had hoped to escape the ire of U.S. District Court Judge Cormac J.Carney, but that didn't happen.
Carney issued a brutal final judgement and permanent injunction against Gugliuzza.
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The judge concluded that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) proved its case that Gugliuzza's operations, including OnlineSupplier,
had from 2005 to 2008 used deceptive practices to lure consumers into a free “Online Auction Starter Kit” program to help sell products on eBay.
Angry consumers later discovered that the kit really wasn't free. Gugliuzza had secretly enrolled them in a monthly, credit card payment plan for the program.
Carney
found Gugliuzza personally liable for the con game and ordered him to
pay a whopping $18.2 million fine as well as submit himself for the next
20 years to a rigorous, record keeping regime for FTC inspections
of his future business activities.
The fine will go to the FTC to help fund future investigations into the practices of other white collar criminals.
One of Gugliuzza's defense lawyers is Wayne R. Gross,
the former head of the U.S. Attorney's office in Santa Ana. Gross, who
has made no secret of his desire to become a judge, was friends with Mike Carona, our disgraced, corrupt ex-sheriff and now federal inmate. Oddly, Gross–now with Greenberg Traurig LLP in Irvine–continued to associate with Carona while other federal law enforcement officials built their corruption case.
Gross, who has been roommates with Orange County Register columnist Frank Mickadeit, had argued that the FTC's case against Gugliuzza was sloppy and unwarranted.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.