Here. And here's the beginning: Imagine you’ve clicked on your computer screen to accept a contract to purchase a good or service—a contract, you only realize later, that’s straight out of Kafka. The widget you’ve bought turns out to be a nightmare. You take to Yelp.com to complain about your experience—but lo, according to the […]
Author Archives: Jeff Sovern
Here. The report addresses issues of dispute resolution (e.g., for unauthorized charges or fraud), security, and privacy, among others.
Here. It's a report on the Senate Banking Committee's hearing on whether he should be confirmed to head the CFPB.
Here. One concern is that fees are not described uniformly, and apparently that makes it hard to comparison shop for such cards. Excerpt: “It’s like the Wild West in terms of the different fees and policies,” said Odysseas Papadimitriou, CEO of CardHub.com. “The card issuers have a million different fees and everyone calls it something […]
by Jeff Sovern Earlier in the week I linked to a Times editorial, Bleeding the Borrowers Dry, about the practice of online payday lenders of lending to consumers in states that bar the kinds of high-interest rate loans payday lenders provide. Here is a link to my letter in the Times about the prospects of […]
The Times report is here. An excerpt: The messages, which typically promise gift cards to national chain stores or other prizes, are sent to random phone numbers and usually direct recipients to a Web site where they are asked for personal information like Social Security numbers or credit card numbers, agency officials said. Rarely, if […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. An excerpt: As with the mortgage cases, the investigation focuses on the banks' poor paperwork and their weak tracking of the debts. When they sold delinquent credit card debt to the buyers, often at only a few cents on the dollar, they allegedly failed to provide them with the evidence that […]
Arpan Sura and Robert A. DeRise, both of Arnold & Porter, have written Conceptualizing Concepcion: The Continuing Viability of Arbitration Regulations. Here's the abstract: Section 2 of the Federal Arbitration Act (“FAA”) provides that arbitration agreements “shall be valid, irrevocable, and enforceable, save upon such grounds as exist at law or in equity for the […]
Ginger Chouinard of New Mexico has written The 'Other' Credit Report: What You Don't Know Can Hurt You. Here's the abstract: Nearly 90% of financial institutions use ChexSystems or similar account screening reports in their account opening process, yet they are under no duty to disclose this to consumers until an account is denied due […]
Nancy Welsh of Penn State has written Mandatory Predispute Consumer Arbitration, Structural Bias, and Incentivizing Procedural Safeguards, 42 Southwestern University Law Review 187 (2012). She presented the paper at the AALS annual conference. Here's the abstract: Within the past several decades, there has been an explosion in the creation, institutionalization and use of “alternative” dispute […]