In 1998, it became involved in a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into what, at the time, was the biggest accounting scandal in corporate history.
After licensing their "interactive shopping" idea in Europe, the Morgan Stanley group took CUC public in the United States in 1983 and raised $20 million.
In February 1996, seeking to expand its operations into the field of interactive entertainment, CUC approached the software companies Sierra On-Line Inc. and Davidson & Associates Inc.
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 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".
After the accounting scandal, the original Comp-U-Card division was bought out by some remaining executives and reorganized into a company called Trilegiant.
On October 23, 2005, Cendant Corporation announced its decision to split into four separate companies: Realogy, Travelport, Wyndham Worldwide and Avis Budget Group.
[8] 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 reserves and purchase reserves that were intended to be "big enough to bury the fraud".
[11] The former CUC chief financial officer Cosmo Corigliano, former comptroller Anne Pember and former accountant Casper Sabatino all pleaded guilty in June 2000 to several fraud and related charges.