The FTC’s Penalty Offenses authority seems good for consumers and businesses. It allows the FTC to warn businesses about specific practices that would constitute unfair and deceptive conduct under its statute, the FTC Act, with the threat of punishing penalties if they nevertheless engaged in the conduct. This warning ideally deters the misconduct and eliminates […]
Category Archives: Unfair & Deceptive Acts & Practices (UDAP), including Discrimination
Ten years after the case was first filed, after intervening regulatory flip-flops and the Supreme Court’s decision in Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, a D.C. district judge granted summary judgment to HUD yesterday in a challenge to its disparate-impact regulations brought by insurers. Limiting its analysis to the question […]
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in AMG Capital Management v. FTC continues to hamper the Federal Trade Commission’s work, and the Commission rightly is shining a spotlight on it. In a recently announced enforcement action, the FTC lamented the AMG decision, which it said limited its ability to secure refunds for duped investors of […]
Luke Herrine of Alabama has written Consumer Protection after Consumer Sovereignty. Here’s the abstract: We seem to be in the middle of a paradigm shift in consumer protection. For decades, regulators understood their mission as “preserving choice” through more effective informational remedies. In the past decade — and more decisively during the Biden Administration — […]
As Adam Pulver noted earlier, the Chamber of Commerce won its challenge at the district court level to the CFPB’s determination that discrimination is unfair within the meaning of the CFPB’s UDAAP statute. It is, of course, no coincidence that the Chamber filed the case in Texas, where it was heard by Judge J. Campbell […]
On Friday, a Texas district judge held that the CFPB’s authority to prohibit “unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices” does not authorize the agency to regulate discrimination as one such practice, invoking the major questions doctrine. As such, in a win for the Chamber of Commerce, he vacated the CFPB’s March 2022 update to […]
The DOJ press release is here. The emails are disturbing (see for yourself below) and are reminiscent of the Trident case. The case resulted in a consent order though, as is usual in such cases, the bank neither admitted nor denied the complaint’s substantive allegations. What makes this even more upsetting is that bank trade […]
The Federal Trade Commission will permanently ban Roomster Corp. and its owners from buying or incentivizing consumer reviews as part of a settlement over charges that they bought fake reviews to entice consumers to pay for access to living arrangement listings that they claimed were verified, authentic, and available but often turned out to be […]
The Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice are sending a total of more than $9 million in refunds to 22,562 consumers who lost money to Ameritech Financial, a student-loan debt-relief scheme operated by Brandon Frere, who was convicted of criminal charges in connection with the scheme. Details are here.