On January 15, 2015, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that he would be proposing legislation to overhaul New York’s data security law and require new and unprecedented safeguards for personal data of consumers. While the proposal has yet to be released, the Attorney General’s press release indicates that the proposal will include a

On January 13, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the District Court’s grant of class certification in a case where plaintiffs allege violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.  In Powers v. Credit Management Services, the defendant filed standard-form complaints and discovery requests against the plaintiffs in state court to collect past

On December 10, Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum proposed more rigorous requirements for companies to disclose data breaches that expose consumers’ personal information.  Testifying before the Oregon joint Senate and House Judiciary Committee, Rosenblum called on the Oregon legislature to update the state’s data breach law and to extend data breach enforcement and notification to

Automotive sales and finance companies often are sued in California under either the Auto Sales Finance Act (“ASFA”) or the Vehicle Leasing Act (“VLA”).  Occasionally, these cases raise claims involving sizeable actual damages, but more often than not, they rest on purely technical disclosure violations or other violations that produced little or no actual or

On January 7, online retailer Zappos.com Inc. reached a long-awaited settlement with nine states over a 2012 data breach that compromised personal and financial information of nearly 24 million of the company’s customers.  Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane said in a published statement that a hacker was able to access sensitive data pertaining to millions

Last month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its annual report on financial services regulations entitled “Dodd-Frank Regulations: Regulators’ Analytical and Coordination Efforts.”

According to this report, federal financial regulators— Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, National Credit

On December 31, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in dismissing a class action appeal as moot, ruled that the putative class representative had not retained a personal stake in the class certification motion after voluntarily settling his individual claims.

In Campion v. Old Republic Protection Company, Inc., the plaintiff

On December 29, a putative class action was filed against Airgas, Inc. for printing expiration dates on credit and debit card receipts.  The putative class action, Aliano et al. v. Airgas USA LLC et al., Case No. 14CH20024 (Cook County), alleges violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and identity theft.  Airgas is an

In recent years, the industry has seen various types of foreclosure rescue fraud perpetrated against borrowers, lenders, and servicers.  One example is a California-based scam that caused losses of more than $2.5 million whereby the scam’s orchestrators recorded fraudulent documents in local courthouses in an effort to “cloud title” and halt or stall the foreclosure

A settlement between the New York Department of Financial Services and automotive lender Condor Capital Corp., as well as Condor’s owner, Stephen Barron, was approved this week by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.  The settlement will result in total payments to the State and consumers of up to