BRIEFCASE.

Byline: - Staff and Wire Services

Locals enjoined in shopping scam

The so-called ``Wal-Mart Shopping Spree'' scam that lured thousands of unsuspecting consumers to open up their bank accounts to illicit transactions has come to an end, the Federal Trade Commission announced Tuesday. Attorneys for the commission obtained temporary restraining orders against five businesses, including Canoga Park-based Consumer Reward Network Inc., and eight individuals, including Harijinder Sidhu of Bell Canyon, to prevent them from offering allegedly free shopping sprees in exchange for bank account information.

The scam, which dates back to at least 2004, involved the defendants allegedly cold-calling consumers to promise them gift cards, movie passes, gasoline vouchers and shopping sprees at the discount department store and Home Depot. To obtain the prize, victims had to provide bank account data that allowed the scammers to run up false charges to the accounts. The commission alleges the defendants violated both the FTC Act by misrepresenting the nature of service and the Telemarketing Sales Rule by engaging in abusive telemarketing tactics.

Investors upset; stocks take a dip

NEW YORK - A mixed economic picture sent stocks tumbling Tuesday, with the Dow Jones industrials falling more than 100 points after investors were unnerved by weakness in home sales, consumer confidence and manufacturing. An upward revision in the fourth-quarter gross domestic product, meanwhile, raised worries about higher interest rates.

The GDP showed that the economy grew at an annual rate of 1.6 percent, much better than the 1.1 percent the Commerce Department initially estimated and beating the 1.5 percent economists predicted. The GDP is the broadest measure of the economy's performance - and one indicator of whether the economy continues to grow fast enough to prompt additional interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve.

The day's other data showed soft spots in the economy. Sales of existing homes fell for the fifth consecutive month January, exacerbating some investors' concerns that a fall in homes sales and refinancing could choke off a source of wealth for consumers, slowing their spending.

Consumer confidence numbers reinforced that worry, dropping below analysts' estimates in February, according to The Conference Board, a New York-based private research group. And a survey of Chicago-area purchasing managers fell unexpectedly; it's seen as a precursor of national manufacturing figures due to be released today.

AOL won't back off on e-mail fee

SAN JOSE - America Online is vowing to carry out its plans to institute fees for mass senders of e-mail, despite protests from groups representing 15 million people that claim the move will stifle communications instead of merely halting spam.

Political group MoveOn.org Civic Action, the AFL-CIO labor union and other organizations have criticized the service, which will charge senders a fee to route their messages directly to AOL users' mailboxes without first passing through AOL junk mail filters.

AOL, a unit of Time Warner Inc., contends the system will help it reduce spam because only legitimate senders of mass e-mail are likely to pony up the fee, ranging from 1/4 cent to 1 cent per message. But critics say the system will end up blocking many e-mails from groups that can't afford the fee.