Boca Raton, FL—Seta Corp., a catalog marketing firm that produces jewelry catalogs for several mailers, agreed on Oct. 30 to pay $350,000 to settle claims that it misled consumers in sweepstakes mailings. Seta’s sweepstakes solicitations had used phrases such as, “You are the $25,000 cash prize winner” when recipients had won nothing. The Florida State Attorney General also cited phony deadlines, releases consenting to publicity for “winners,” and hard-to-read disclaimers.
The four-year-old lawsuit “cost a lot of time, money, and resources,” said Seta attorney Keith Goldbaum in a statement. “Given current environment, when we saw an opportunity, we made a business decision to settle the case.”
For Seta, the trip to Florida’s courts wasn’t anything new. The company reached out-of-court settlements with the state in 1984 and 1994 in cases that charged Seta with using deceptive practices in its mailings. But the collapse of the ’94 agreement followed by a number of settlements with larger sweepstakes operators led to the 1997 suit.