The Federal Trade Commission announced today:
The Federal Trade Commission has charged a data broker operation with illegally selling payday loan applicants’ financial information to a scam operation that took millions of dollars from consumers by debiting their bank accounts and charging their credit cards without their consent.
According to the FTC’s complaint, the data broker enterprise bought loan applications from the operators of payday loan websites, and got others directly from consumers via their own payday loan websites. Instead of passing on those applications to legitimate payday lenders, the defendants sold the information to companies like Ideal Financial Solutions Inc., which purchased the financial account information for more than 500,000 consumers from the defendants and raided their accounts for at least $7.1 million. As a result, some consumers had to close their accounts or were charged fees for insufficient funds.
The FTC's complaint is here.
The FTC's full press release is here.
