Thirty-eight state and territorial attorneys general recently sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting that it update its Telemarketing Sales Rules to help further protect against telemarketing fraud and abuse.
While the state attorneys general support existing Telemarketing Sales Rules, the group listed a number of concerns, including:
On November 25, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that it plans to push back three key rulemakings until next year. These rulemakings center on overdraft protection, payday lending, and debt collection. The agenda released by the CFPB stated that it would issue proposals on these issues in the first seven months of 2015. This
Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Federal Trade Commission filed two complaints against multiple companies operating “multi-million dollar schemes to sell tech support services to consumers nationwide,” according to a news release by the State Attorney General’s office.
According to Bondi and the FTC, the first complaint alleges that Inbound Call Experts LLC, Super
On November 14, Maine’s Attorney General Janet T. Mills issued a warning to the state’s residents regarding calls from “scammers” demanding immediate payment on supposed debts. Mills’ warning stemmed from many recent reports to her office of aggressive calls from “scammers” attempting to get consumers to make payments by wire transfer or pre-paid debit card.
The Federal Trade Commission has stopped an online program that allegedly lured consumers with “free” access to their credit scores and then billed them a recurring fee of $29.95 per month for a credit monitoring program they never ordered. The defendants are One Technologies LP (also doing business as ScoreSense, One Technologies Inc., and MyCreditHealth);
On November 10, the Supreme Court declined to review an appeal by debt collection law firm Phelan Hallinan & Shmieg LLP over a Third Circuit decision in a class action that held that debtors are not required to dispute a debt under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act before filing an FDCPA lawsuit.
On June
On November 13, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that a debt collector’s voicemail message did not violate the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act when it never mentioned that plaintiff owed a debt or conveyed any information about the debt, despite being overheard by the plaintiff’s son. In Zweigenhaft
On October 28, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued the latest edition of its “Supervisory Highlights” report, covering illegalities it discovered in the debt collection, student loan servicing, and mortgage collection markets between March and June 2014. Although the Bureau acknowledged increased efforts by covered entities to ensure regulatory compliance, the report nevertheless
At the request of the Federal Trade Commission, a U.S. district court judge in Miami has temporarily shut down a fraudulent phantom debt collection operation that allegedly deceived Spanish-speaking consumers across the country.
On October 20, the FTC filed a complaint against Centro Natural Corp., Sumore LLC, and several individual defendants alleging that defendants illegally
On November 5, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a report detailing debt collection complaint statics received from older consumers between July 2013 and September 2014.
From a broader perspective, the CFPB reports that since September 2013, consumers of all ages have filed more complaints with the CFPB about debt collection than about any other