The Federal Trade Commission recently reached a settlement agreement with a Los Angeles-based company purporting to offer student loan debt relief services for alleged violations of the FTC Act and the Telemarketing Sales Rule.
The FTC filed a complaint against defendants Salar Tahour and his companies, M&T Financial Group and American Counseling Center Corp., as
On June 11, St. Louis County officials signed an executive order, effective immediately, that would “ban the box” and ensure that St. Louis County will no longer ask job applicants for criminal histories in their initial employment applications. Other jurisdictions in Missouri with ban-the-box laws include Jackson County, Columbia, and Kansas City.
“A parolee’s failure
In mid-May 2018, per multiple reports, John Michael “Mick” Mulvaney, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, announced plans to fold the CFPB’s Office of Students and Young Consumers into its preexisting Office of Financial Education, itself a part of this agency’s Consumer Education and Engagement Division. During this reorganization, the
As the student loan total keeps climbing and Congress keeps debating what to do, advice from all corners keeps bombarding the nation’s desperate borrowers. Some tout the use of crowdfunding via sites like GoFundMe and Zero Bound; others encourage borrowers to leverage rebate programs; and in some cases, cryptocurrencies have been hyped
On June 7, the Federal Trade Commission issued a public notice regarding the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which goes into effect on September 21, 2018. The new law mandates that the three major credit reporting agencies set up webpages to allow consumers to request one-year fraud alerts and credit freezes. The
On May 31, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a $150,000 sanctions award against three consumer attorneys and their law firms for bad faith conduct and misrepresentations.
The opinion reads like a detective story and lays out, in the Court’s own words, “a mosaic of half-truths, inconsistencies, mischaracterizations, exaggerations, omissions, evasions, and failures to
Many employers use background checks when evaluating potential candidates for hire. They do this for a variety of reasons, from basic due diligence to a desire to avoid negligent hiring claims in the future. If an employer intends to use this employment background check – often referred to as a consumer report – to take
On May 29, the Ninth Circuit ruled that an end-user’s misuse of reported information does not render a credit reporting agency’s report inaccurate for purposes of liability under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. The Court affirmed the district court’s grant of summary judgment in the putative class action case brought against a national credit
On March 31, 2018 the United States crossed a milestone. As of that date, Americans’ student loan debt topped $1.5 trillion, exceeding the share of consumer debt held by auto loans ($1.1 trillion) and credit cards ($988 billion), and jumping by more than $521 billion in roughly six years.
A report released in May
On May 15, an en banc panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision finding the statute of limitations for an alleged violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act begins on the date the violation occurs, not on the date the debtor discovers the violation. The ruling adds to the growing