Watchdog Journal's Government desk is our enforcement desk: it tracks what regulators and courts do about wrongdoing elsewhere, not officials themselves. This is the third edition of our recurring roundup.
Fraud & Deception
FTC + DOJ + Wisconsin · Court judgment · April 2026. The operator of a timeshare exit scheme was ordered to pay $140 million and permanently banned from the industry, after allegedly defrauding roughly 18,000 mostly older consumers out of more than $90 million. Read the full report →DOCUMENTED
Media
FTC · Settlement · May 2026. Shutterstock agreed to pay $35 million after the FTC cited the company's own internal emails acknowledging customers didn't understand what they had signed up for. Read the full report →DOCUMENTED
Corporations
SEC · FY2025 enforcement results · April 2026. The SEC's own fiscal year summary reported $17.9 billion in monetary relief across 456 enforcement actions, including a $60 million real estate Ponzi scheme and a $400 million scheme affecting 2,700 investors. Read our report on one case from this docket →DOCUMENTED
What this edition shows
This month's cases span timeshare resale, stock-photo licensing, and general securities fraud — industries with essentially nothing in common except the presence, in each case, of a documented gap between what a company claimed and what regulators or courts ultimately found. A fee structure marketed as one thing and operated as another, an eight-screen cancellation flow, and a Ponzi scheme's promised returns all fail the same basic test: they could not survive contact with the underlying record once someone was empowered to check it.
The Enforcement Ledger will continue tracking these actions as they become public.
Sources behind this report
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