The Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection division recently issued a staff perspective paper on the consumer protection issues facing small business financing. The paper follows the agency’s “Strictly Business” forum, held in May 2019, which examined trends in the marketplace, including online loans and alternative financing products. “The agency remains committed to protecting
On February 24, Judge Dale Kimball of the United States District Court for the District of Utah granted in part and denied in part a defendant debt collector’s motion for judgment on the pleadings. Plaintiffs Karl Buhler and Reginald Benoit, two Utah residents, filed a lawsuit against BCG Equities (BCG), claiming that it violated
In many of the settlement agreements and stipulated orders in the FTC’s recently released 2019 Privacy and Data Security Update, the FTC repeatedly imposed a set of uniform mandates for businesses to implement following a data breach. Businesses subject to the new California Consumer Privacy Act may be able to use this mandate to
Applying the definition of an automatic telephone dialing system required by the recent Eleventh Circuit decision Glasser v. Hilton Grand Vacations Co., LLC, Judge Charlene Honeywell from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida held in Northrup v. Innovative Health Ins. Partners, LLC, et al., that the Twilio
Ever steadfast in its mission to provide market transparency, this month the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Inc. announced the launch of a “targeted examination” of the sales practices of investment firms that claim to charge “zero commissions” on client trades, and “the impact that not charging commissions has or will have on the [f]irms’ order
On February 27, 2020, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued its decision in Ramirez v. TransUnion LLC, a class-action case watched closely by consumer reporting agencies and other persons regulated by the Fair Credit Reporting Act (“FCRA”). In Ramirez, the Court held for the first time that all
In Meier v. Allied Interstate, LLC, Judge Gonzalo P. Curial found that while LiveVox HCI could store numbers as required by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, because each call required human intervention, it did not qualify as an automatic telephone dialing system within the definition of the TCPA.
Plaintiff Richard Meier brought an action
In Alston v. Orion Portfolio Servs., LLC, the United States District Court for the District of Maryland ordered a pro se plaintiff to pay nearly $15,000 in legal fees incurred by the defendants in defending a frivolous claim asserted under the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act.
This case concerns and alleged debt of $1,391
In Johnson v. Comodo Group, the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey denied the defendant’s motion for summary judgment on two key issues in a claim asserting violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, finding that a predictive dialer qualifies as an automatic telephone dialing system under the statute and
In Allen v. Credit Collection Services, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California recently ruled that a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act plaintiff’s vague, self-serving testimony of oral revocation was insufficient to trump a debt collector’s detailed call records that contained no evidence of revocation. The court’s decision illustrates the