Category Archives: Unfair & Deceptive Acts & Practices (UDAP), including Discrimination

Consumers report losing $2.7 billion to social media scams since 2021

New data from the Federal Trade Commission shows that scams originating on social media have accounted for $2.7 billion in reported losses since 2021, more than any other contact method. The FTC says that the most frequently reported scams on social media are related to online shopping, with 44 percent of reports pointing to fraud […]

Tax Preparation Companies Receive FTC’s “Penalty Offenses” Warning

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 […]

DC court rejects insurers’ challenge to HUD disparate impact rules

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 […]

FTC Can’t Refund Consumers in Deceptive Investment Scheme

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 paper: Consumer Protection after Consumer Sovereignty

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 — […]

Chamber of Commerce’s Forum Shopping Pays Off in Discrimination/Unfairness Case

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 […]

Texas Judge Holds That Discrimination is Not Unfair and Vacates CFPB Rule

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 […]

Racist emails surface in DOJ redlining case against American Bank of Oklahoma

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 […]