The Consumer Product Safety Commission has created a recall app for your mobile phone allowing easy tracking of federal consumer product safety recalls. Get the app here.
Last week, the National Consumer Law Center's Chi Chi Wu testified before the House Financial Services Committee on continuing serious problems plaguing the credit reporting industry, including its failure to ensure the accuracy of credit reports. Among other things, the testimony identified these concerns: unacceptable error rates and the myriad types of systemic inaccuracies in […]
Read this article by Renae Merle entitled How a payday lending industry insider tilted academic research in its favor. It explains how payday-loan industry lobbyists bought (and sometimes wrote) research from supposedly independent academics purporting to show that payday loans don't harm consumers. Oh, and by the way, the payday-loan industry's lobby group "held its 2018 […]
The CFPB has released a report on financial exploitation of the elderly by people ranging from offshore scammers to family members. The report compiles information from Suspicious Activity Reports submitted by banks, credit unions, casinos, and other financial services providers. The 180,000 elder financial exploitation SARs reviewed for the report were submitted from 2013 to […]
The Federal Trade Commission announced its first case challenging a marketer’s use of fake paid reviews on an independent retail website. In a settlement announced at the same time, Cure Encapsulations and its owner resolved allegations that they made false and unsubstantiated claims for their garcinia cambogia weight-loss supplement and that they paid a third-party […]
The Supreme Court has granted review in Rotkiskie v. Klemm. The question presented in the 8-page (!) petition for a writ of certiorari is whether the “discovery rule” applies to toll the one (1) year statute of limitations under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), 15 U.S.C. §§ 1692, et seq., as the Fourth […]
Andrew T. Hayashi of Virginia has written Consumer Law Myopia. Here is the abstract: People make mistakes with debt, partly because the chance to buy now and pay later tempts them to do things that are not in their long-term interest. Lenders sell credit products that exploit this vulnerability. In this Article, I argue that critiques […]
by Jeff Sovern A post inspired by a question I heard Kathleen Engel ask: every year second-year students ask professors for suggestions for topics to write about for law reviews. Law professors and other lawyers also cast about for article topics. Meanwhile, administrative agencies often confront questions about what the law is or how it […]
According to a report issued by the Federal Trade Commission last week, between July 1, 2017 and June 30, 2018, the agency’s law enforcement actions yielded more than $2.3 billion in refunds to defrauded consumers, including $122 million mailed directly by the FTC to 2.2 million people. The report is here.
That's the name of this story by Elizabeth Dwoskin. Here's an excerpt: Last May, officials in Midlothian, Texas, a city near Dallas, approved more than $10 million in tax breaks for a huge, mysterious new development across from a shuttered Toys R Us warehouse. … The developer, which incorporated with the state four months earlier, went […]