Despite two controlling decisions by the Second Circuit in Avila and Taylor, claims involving the “amount of debt” disclosure under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA”) continue to evolve thanks to the relentless efforts by the New York plaintiffs’ bar. But these permutations of the “amount of debt” claims continue to be successfully
In a case of first impression, the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan held that direct-to-voicemail messages qualify as a “call” under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. The Court’s opinion thus subjects another modern technology to the requirements of express consent and other strictures of the TCPA.
Defendant debt collector Dyck-O’Neal,
As designed and envisioned, student loan ombudsmen are government officials tasked with helping borrowers struggling with repaying their student loans. Among other varied means, they are designed to protect consumers from unfair debt collection practices and help them understand their repayment options. In recent years, a growing number of jurisdictions, including Connecticut, Illinois, and the
This past May, alums of a for-profit program run by the now-defunct Corinthian Colleges, Inc. won a stunning, albeit temporary and partial, victory against the Department of Education: the grant of their motion for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction by a magistrate judge sitting on the United States District Court for
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
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 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
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
As disclosed in a notification filed on May 3, in FMS Investment Corp. v. United States (“the Notice”), the Department of Education (“DOE”) will soon stop using private debt collectors to handle overdue student loan payments.
In this post-award bid protest filed on February 9, 2018, in the United States