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The former owners of a Milan car dealership pleaded guilty to bank fraud charges during a hearing Friday in U.S. District Court, Rock Island.

Jens Hirsch, 45, and Pamela A. Hirsch, 55, of Rock Island, the former owners of Blackhawk Auto, pleaded guilty to one count each of bank fraud, conspiracy to commit bank fraud and making a false statement to a bank.

Sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 14.

According to a news release issued by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of Illinois, the Hirsches admitted that with Jens as president and Pamela as vice president and secretary of Strategic Enterprises Inc., doing business as Blackhawk Auto, they defrauded Milan Bank in 2008.

Blackhawk Auto, located at 1920 E. 1st Ave., had an agreement with the bank for a line of credit of $1.5 million, which would be used to purchase vehicles for reselling.

Upon sale of the vehicles, Blackhawk Auto was to repay the bank the outstanding balance for the respective vehicle.

The Hirsches admitted they used the proceeds from sales for other uses and failed to repay the bank.

The loss to the bank was more than $400,000, but less than $1 million.

The penalty for each of the offenses is a prison sentence of up to 30 years and a fine of up to $1 million. However, the plea agreements in the case will determine the final sentence, according to the news release.

The one-time leading social networking site Myspace has reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over the privacy probe recently conducted.

Myspace was charged with representing its privacy policies to its users, which brings to mind similar deals agreed upon by Google and Facebook on respective FTC investigations involving them.

FTC announced last week that despite Myspace’s telling users that it will not share personally identifiable data with others; it gave advertisers “Friend ID” numbers of users. This enabled advertisers to search the users’ publicly available personal data such as full names and could even lead to discovery of their web activity.

The terms of the settlement specified that Myspace is not going to misrepresent its privacy policies while implementing a comprehensive privacy program. In addition, the two parties agreed to a regular independent privacy audits every other year for 2 decades.

Myspace had been the most popular social network since it launched in 2003 but was overshadowed by the arrival of Facebook. Specific Media of Irvine California is the current owner of Myspace after News Corp sold it for USD 35 million last year.

Black Hawk Mines said that it had already conducted a complete assessment of Myspace’s privacy and advertising practices after its acquisition and had “successfully improved upon its historical practices”, taking the now social media platform to the forefront of industry’s best practice for ad delivery. Moreover, any questions about Myspace’s pre-acquisition ad practices were apparently put behind.

Back in 2011, FTC and Google also reached a settlement over charges that the search engine a breach of its own privacy policy had happened in launching the now defunct social platform named Buzz. Their agreement will require Google to get user permission first before sharing consumer data with third parties or if it is going to change a service and use the data in a way that could violate existing privacy policies.

The FTC also had a settlement with Facebook last year which involves the social network’s commitment to getting user approvals (opting in) before changing their privacy settings.