The blog Credit Slips reports today: Yesterday, Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia issued a very cogent 70-page opinion in the case of the CFPB v. Frederick Hanna & Associates, a large collection law firm with offices in Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina. The opinion denies Hanna's motion to dismiss in its […]
Author Archives: Allison Zieve
The Wall Street Journal reports today that bankers and housing advocates are teaming up in effort to ease mortgage access for borrowers with weaker credit. A rare coalition of mortgage lenders and left-leaning consumer advocates are calling on the Obama administration to ease up on lawsuits they say are driving banks away from making loans […]
The Hill reports: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has returned more than $10 billion to consumers who were scammed since the watchdog agency opened its doors four years ago. CFPB Director Richard Cordray revealed the results of the relief the agency has provided to more than 17 million consumers on Wednesday in his semi-annual […]
Bloomberg reports: Millions of people search online for information about symptoms and prescription drugs. Patterns in their searches might reveal previously unknown side effects of medications. The Food and Drug Administration is talking to Google about how the search engine could help the agency identify previously unknown side effects of medications. Agency officials held a […]
In October, the Supreme Court will hear a case called Spokeo v. Robins, which poses the question, as formulated by the defendant company, "whether Congress may confer Article III standing upon a plaintiff who suffers no concrete harm, and who therefore could not otherwise invoke the jurisdiction of a federal court, by authorizing a private […]
Politico has this story about implementation — or lack thereof — of the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act. Here is the gist of it: On paper, the law that Congress passed in late 2010 — known as the Food Safety Modernization Act — was bigger than anything since Teddy Roosevelt cleaned up the meatpacking industry. […]
Deciding a case under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the Third Circuit held this week that debt collectors bear the burden of proving that their contacts with third parties fall under an exception to a ban on such contact when pursuing repayment from consumers. The court summarized the case this way: Under the Fair […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Department of Justice yesterday resolved an action with American Honda Finance Corporation concerning discretionary auto loan pricing and compensation practices. The CFPB explains: "Honda’s past practices resulted in thousands of African-American, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific Islander borrowers paying higher interest rates than white borrowers for their auto loans, […]
On June 18, the FCC announced adoption of a set of a set of rules to resolve questions about the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. See our summary here. Last Friday, the FCC issued the declaratory ruling. The TCPA Blog has this business-side perspective.
The Federal Trade Commission has had a busy week. Yesterday, the FTC announced that it had stopped a "massive payday loan fraud scheme." The operators of a payday lending scheme that allegedly bilked millions of dollars from consumers by trapping them into loans they never authorized will be banned from the consumer lending business under […]