Abbott Laboratories
- 🚩 Abbott recalled their powder infant formula after reports of serious bacterial infections in some infants.
- Sources: www.reuters.com
- Defense: They say there is no evidence to link their formulas to the illnesses. The FDA and CDC have not published any links yet.
Categories: food
Amazon
- 🚩 Amazon Ring was accused of privacy violations, where employees spied on female customers by accessing their cameras without permissions. They settled the case.
- Sources: www.reuters.com
- Defense: They said "While we disagree with the FTC's claims regarding both Alexa and Ring, and deny violating the law, these settlements put these matters behind us."
Categories: electronics
Apple
- 🚩 Apple slowed down older iPhones (a.k.a. "Batterygate")
- Sources: www.washingtonpost.com
- Defense: They say that they did it so that older devices don't shut down unexpectedly or experience other malfunctions due to excessive demands on their dated batteries
Categories: electronics
Bassar
- 🚩 Bassar recalled some of its dog snack products after 40 reports of dog deaths after those dogs ate Bassar's snacks which were supposedly contaminated with ethylene glycol.
- Sources: g1.globo.com (Portuguese)
Categories: pet food
Boeing
- 🚩 Two Boeing 737 MAX planes crashed due to a flawed flight control system called MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). Boeing tried to hide the existence of this system by not training pilots on it and even *removing* references to it from the flight manuals. For initial certification they claimed it to be an upgrade to an existing system whereas it was a new one, in order to minimize scrutiny. In the subsequent investigation to the crashes other design problems in the flight computers were uncovered.
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org, www.netflix.com (critically acclaimed documentary)
Categories: travel
Butterball
- 🚩 They recalled more than 14,100 pounds of ground turkey after customers found blue plastic embedded in their products.
- Sources: edition.cnn.com
Categories: food
Credit Suisse
- 🚩 Credit Suisse is accused of mismarking their security positions, assist residents in evading sanctions, conspire with Americans to file false tax returns, wire fraud, violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, hire private detectives to investigate leaving senior executives, allowing drug traffickers to launder money, destruction of evidence, and more. To several of these they pleaded guilty or settled.
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org
Categories: finance
Danske Bank
- 🚩 Danske Bank / its Estonian branch is accused of possibly the largest money laundering scandal in Europe, as well as assisting customers in evading US sanctions by giving them access to the US financial system, to which they pleaded guilty
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org, www.justice.gov
Categories: finance
Firestone
- 🚩 A specific set of Firestone tires proved to be prone to tread separation, which caused several accidents and deaths.
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org
- Defense: They say that Ford recommended the wrong tire pressure and that the vehicles the tires were mounted on were particularly prone to rollovers
Categories: transportation
Goldman Sachs
- 🚩 Goldman Sachs was accused of artificially shortening the supply of Aluminium by shuffling it between warehouses and telling their customers that the retrieval takes long because of a shortage of forklift operators and administrative overhead. They agreed on a settlement to a class action lawsuit.
- Sources: topclassactions.com, web.archive.org (archived New York Times article)
Categories: finance
HP (Hewlett-Packard)
- 🚩 HP issued a firmware update which blocks customers from using cheaper, non-HP ink cartridges in its printers
- Sources: www.telegraph.co.uk
- Defense: They say that third-party cartridges that contain non-HP chips can pose risks to the hardware performance, print quality, and security
Categories: electronics
Hyundai
- 🚩 Hyundai is accused of illegally employing children in Alabama (either directly in a Hyundai-owned supplier or benefiting from the practice in other suppliers, partially with the help of temporary work agencies), of which most were refugees from Central America, of which some were threatened with deportation
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org, www.reuters.com (initial report), www.reuters.com (follow-up about investigation and consequences)
- Defense: They deny the allegation that they knowingly employed anyone who is ineligible for employment, saying they rely on temporary work agencies to fill jobs and expect these agencies to follow the law in recruiting, hiring, and placing workers on their premises. They're divesting their controlling stake of one of the suppliers.
Categories: transportation
Lenovo
- 🚩 Lenovo preinstalled software on their laptops that intercepted and decrypted users' web traffic, as well as allowed malicious actors to spoof any website the users visited
- Sources: www.cisa.gov, en.wikipedia.org, support.lenovo.com
- Defense: They say that a third-party add-on introduced a potential vulnerability that they did not know about
- 🚩 Lenovo shipped laptops with a driver named "SecureBackDoor" that could be exploited to deploy flash implants and circumvent secure boot
- Sources: www.techradar.com, www.zdnet.com, www.eset.com (they found the issue), support.lenovo.com
- Defense: They say that one driver was mistakenly included in the BIOS image, and another was mistakenly not deactivated
Categories: electronics
Samsung
- 🚩 Samsung had to recall the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone because of a battery defect that could cause the phone to catch fire or explode. After issueing replacement phones these had to be recalled as well for the same reason.
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org
Categories: electronics
Siemens
- 🚩 Siemens is accused of bribing Greek government officials to win state contracts
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org
Categories: electronics
Sony BMG
- 🚩 When inserting a *music CD* produced by the record company into a PC, a rootkit was installed automatically that modified the operating system to interfere with CD copying and/or sent data about the user's private listening habits to Sony BMG.
While targeting copyright abuses the software itself infringed copyright by using copyleft code.
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org
Categories: entertainment
Sony Music
- 🚩 Sony Music was accused of anti-competitive price fixing to increase music CD prices together with Universal Music, Warner Music and others. They settled the case.
- Sources: web.archive.org (archived New York Times article)
Categories: entertainment
Tether Limited
- 🚩 Tether Limited is accussed of falsely claiming that "every tether is always backed 1-to-1, by traditional currency held in our reserves", whereas as much as 26% of the reserves were other assets and receivables from loans made by Tether to third parties
- Sources: www.cftc.gov (PDF download), en.wikipedia.org
Categories: finance
The North Face
- 🚩 The North Face replaced Wikipedia images with their own branded images to rank higher in Google image search results.
- Sources: web.archive.org (archived New York Times article)
- Defense: They apologized and promised to train their teams and vendors better in Wikipedia's policies
Categories: clothing
Ticketmaster
- 🚩 Ticketmaster is accused of anti-competitive practices, secret partnership with scalpers (that buy up tickets quickly just to sell them for a higher price on a secondary market), deceptive pricing, hacking a competitor's computer systems and deceptive customer communication. Ticketmaster settled some of the lawsuits or entered into plea agreements with federal prosecutors.
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org
Categories: entertainment
Toyota
- 🚩 Toyota had to recall cars that had defects causing unintended acceleration
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org
Categories: transportation
Universal Music
- 🚩 Universal Music was accused of anti-competitive price fixing to increase music CD prices together with Sony Music, Warner Music and others. They settled the case.
- Sources: web.archive.org (archived New York Times article)
Categories: entertainment
VW (Volkswagen)
- 🚩 VW cheated on emissions tests by detecting when the car was being tested and temporarily changing the engine's behavior to pass the test. In normal operation the engine would emit up to 40 times the allowed amount of nitrogen oxides. (A.k.a. "Dieselgate")
- Sources: en.wikipedia.org
Categories: transportation
Warner Music
- 🚩 Warner Music was accused of anti-competitive price fixing to increase music CD prices together with Sony Music, Universal Music and others. They settled the case.
- Sources: web.archive.org (archived New York Times article)
Categories: entertainment