The CFPB's field hearing on payday lending is underway, and is being livestreamed at the Bureau's website. Watch it here.
Category Archives: Unfair & Deceptive Acts & Practices (UDAP), including Discrimination
Lauren Willis (of Loyola Los Angeles) and Theresa Amato (of the Fair Contracts Project) have a great op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times on what to do about consumer financial illiteracy. "There are dozens of entities devoted to educating you about all things financial," they write, "[b]ut none of it is working very well." Financial […]
by Maura Dundon (Senior Policy Counsel, Center for Responsible Lending) The sale of Corinthian Colleges (the for-profit college chain that operates Everest, WyoTech, and Heald) to the student loan debt collector ECMC is poised to close today. The deal has raised serious concerns about the fate of Corinthian students and whether the new entity represents […]
by Deepak Gupta In today's Los Angeles Times, consumer columnist David Lazarus takes a look at the practice of for-profit debt collectors renting out the seal and letterhead of local California prosecutors — the target of a new class-action lawsuit that our firm filed yesterday in federal court in San Francisco. The practice was condemned in […]
by Deepak Gupta Since its inception, this blog has covered the pernicious practice of prosecutors who rent out their name and authority to private for-profit debt collectors. As readers may recall, these debt collectors use official-looking letterhead to threaten consumers who have accidentally bounced checks for household purchases — consumers are told they'll face criminal […]
. . . and finds Pennsylvania's law wanting in his column, N.J. wrong to consider weakening consumer protection. An interesting natural experiment.
The main story is here, and sidebars on efforts to silence internet critics can be found here (quoting fellow blogger Scott Michelman) and here. An excerpt: [The consumers] agreed to pay $16,600 in principal and interest, with seven years of monthly $195 installments. In return, Sundance promised 30 weeks of "resort area condominium accommodations" in […]
by Jeff Sovern Back in April, the American Tort Reform Association had a roundtable discussion about UDAP statutes with FTC Commissioner (and former George Mason professor) Joshua Wright, Joanna Shepherd-Bailey of Emory, Peter Holland of Maryland Law School, and Cary Silverman of Shook Hardy & Bacon. You can watch it here. Given the host, you […]
by Stephen Gardner The Board of Directors of the National Association of Consumer Advocates adopted the Third Edition of its Standards and Guidelines for Litigating and Settling Class Actions on May 13 (Download here), continuing a tradition of setting high standards for the ways consumer class actions are handled that began with the first Guidelines adopted in […]
Here. And here is a video of the event described in the article.