The FTC’s five recipient lists, as one file

Name: FTC Notice of Penalty Offenses - consolidated recipient lists
Creator: KnightByrd
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The Commission published its Notice of Penalty Offenses recipients as five separate PDFs of scanned company names. This is all of them, consolidated, machine-readable, and free. 2,527 companies.

The fact that a company is on this list is NOT an indication that it has done anything wrong. A Notice of Penalty Offenses is not a complaint, a finding, a settlement, or an allegation against the recipient. The Commission sent these notices broadly across whole industries so that civil penalties would become available in future against any company that went on to break the law. This sentence is written into the files themselves, because a dataset outlives the page it came from.

CSV2,527 rows · opens in any spreadsheet JSONsame data, plus notice definitions and totals · CORS open

What is in it

Column	What it holds
`company`	The registered name exactly as the FTC printed it
`slug`	Stable identifier, safe to join on
`record_url`	The public page for that recipient
`notices`	Which of the five notices they received
`notice_count`	How many — 50 companies are on more than one
`source_list`	Which published FTC list the row came from

The five notices

Notice	Recipients
Money-making opportunities	1,131
Endorsements and testimonials	705
Substantiation of product claims	665
For-profit education	70
Misuse of information collected in confidential contexts	6

How it was built, and where it can be wrong

The five rosters were parsed from the Commission’s published PDFs and merged on company name, so a company appearing on three lists is one row with three notices. Names are kept exactly as the FTC printed them, which means the same corporate group can appear under several legal entities — that is how the source reads, and normalising it would be us editing a federal record.

Parsing scanned PDFs is imperfect. Seven rows in an earlier build were not companies at all but the documents’ own running headers and disclaimer, and were removed; the parser now rejects that furniture. If you find another, the authoritative source is ftc.gov and we would rather hear about it than not.

If you want the other half

We also resolved these companies to live websites and read 480 of them. 72% publish at least one claim with no evidence cited beside it. Method, limits and full counts. No company is named in that work either.

Using it

Free for any purpose, including commercial, with attribution. If it saves you a week, a link is the whole price.

KnightByrd, “FTC Notice of Penalty Offenses — consolidated recipient lists”
https://kema.knightbyrd.com/ftc/data
Compiled from the Federal Trade Commission’s published recipient lists.

Compiled from public records published by the Federal Trade Commission. We link to the Commission rather than rehost its documents. Nothing here is legal advice, and appearing on a recipient list is not an indication that a company has done anything wrong. Search the index · Browse A–Z