products allowed CUC to find new customers in demographics it had not previously reached. In December 1997, CUC merged with HFS Incorporated. A competition was held internally at CUC, primarily among its senior marketing staff but open to all employees, to come up with a new corporate name. The winner was to receive dinner "anywhere in the world". No employee submission was selected to win, as the name of the company had already been decided. The new company was named Cendant. After the merger, Cendant retained its core business as a direct marketer and thereafter also specialized in hotel franchises, car rentals, travel agencies and its consumer software operations, Cendant Software. The merger of these two companies, which between them owned "a virtual monopoly in the worldwide market for full-service timeshare exchange services" according to the Federal Trade Commission, caused the FTC to require "the parties to divest one of their timeshare exchange companies to re-establish a viable competitor in the market". Cendant Software, composed of Sierra, Davidson & Associates (including Blizzard Entertainment), Knowledge Adventure and Gryphon Software, was sold in 1998 to the French publisher Havas, which then merged with Vivendi, which then merged with Activision. After the accounting scandal, the original Comp-U-Card division was bought out by some remaining executives and reorganized into a company called Trilegiant. It was later renamed Affinion Group and is still located in Stamford, Connecticut. On October 23, 2005, Cendant Corporation announced its decision to split into four separate companies: Realogy, Travelport, Wyndham Worldwide and Avis Budget Group." Accounting scandal On April 16, 1998, less than one year after the new brand was introduced, Cendant disclosed that for three years prior to the merger, CUC had fraudulently overstated its income by over US$500 million. This caused Cendant stock to plummet from $39 to $20 in a single day, eventually reaching $9, and costing shareholders about US$14 billion. Cendant/CUC was eventually required to pay more than US$2.85 billion in class action settlements to shareholders. The Securities and Exchange Commission brought civil charges against CUC's president Kirk Shelton and CEO and chairman Walter Forbes, for the "long-running financial fraud" which, it alleged, started in 1995. The SEC stated that CUC inflated its books in order to inflate its stock price, which allowed it to use its stock to buy other companies, and in turn these mergers and acquisitions were executed in order to generate financial