The Federal Trade Commission announced today that it obtained court orders permanently barring a group of California-based marketers from the deceptive marketing and billing tactics allegedly used to promote their skincare products. Twenty-nine defendants who sold Auravie, Dellure, LéOR Skincare, and Miracle Face Kit branded skincare products have agreed to court orders with the FTC […]
The Federal Trade Commission announced that is charged the operators of a multi-national tech support company with using deceptive pop-up internet ads to scare thousands of consumers into paying hundreds of dollars each for unnecessary technical support services. It obtained a court order temporarily stopping the defendants’ practices and freezing their assets. The defendants commonly […]
NPR's Marketplace reported this morning: In the last few years, there's been such a spike in drug coupons, pharmaceutical companies have barely been able to print them fast enough. Coupons help patients shoulder the cost of expensive prescriptions, but a new paper out in the New England Journal of Medicine finds certain coupons are also […]
On Tuesday, we posted here and here about the D.C. Circuit's decision in PHH Corporation v. CFPB, which held that the CFPB's governing structure is unconstitutional because its director is too independent of the President — the CFPB is an independent agency run not by a multi-member commission (the members of which serve as checks on one another), but by one […]
by Paul Alan Levy Profile Defenders, which has been linked to a pattern of defrauding courts to get material removed from the Internet altogether or, at least, suppressed in search engine results, has refused to comment directly on the spate of articles describing its modus operandi. However, a press release issued yesterday suggests the direction […]
The case the Supreme Court agreed to hear today, Midland Funding v. Johnson, involves both whether filing a proof of claim for a time-barred debt in a bankruptcy proceeding is debt collection activity that violates the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and whether, if so, the Bankruptcy Code effectively preempts the FDCPA's application to bankruptcy […]
The case is Midland Funding, LLC v. Johnson. SCOTUSBlog describes the issues as: (1) Whether the filing of an accurate proof of claim for an unextinguished time-barred debt in a bankruptcy proceeding violates the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act; and (2) whether the Bankruptcy Code, which governs the filing of proofs of claim in bankruptcy, […]
. . . from Adam Levitin at Credit Slips. I don't usually link to Credit Slips, on the theory that most of our blog readers also read that blog, but this post was too good not to link to. It will be interesting to see if this decision does indeed take the wind out of the […]
Read the court's very long opinion. The basic problem identified by the D.C. Circuit is that the CFPB is an independent agency run not by a multi-member commission (the members of which serve as checks on one another), but by one director (who may only be removed by the President for cause, see 12 U.S.C. […]
BY PAUL ALAN LEVY AND EUGENE VOLOKH There are about 25 court cases throughout the country that have a suspicious profile: All involve allegedly self-represented plaintiffs, yet they have similar snippets of legalese that suggest a common organization behind them. (A few others, having a slightly different profile, involve actual lawyers.) All the ostensible defendants ostensibly […]