On January 17, the New York Attorney General (AG) filed a motion to compel a debt collection company and its owner to produce financial documents, business records, and other documents in a lawsuit alleging that the defendants were part of an illegal debt collection scheme.
The lawsuit, which was filed in November 2016 by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the AG, alleges that the defendants violated the Consumer Financial Protection Act, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and New York state law by purchasing defaulted consumer debt, and then inflating each debt by $200, even where not authorized to do so by contract or applicable law. The defendants allegedly impersonated law enforcement officials and threatened consumers in order to collect the debts.
About a year after the suit was filed, on November 8, 2017, the CFPB and AG served interrogatories and document requests on the defendants. The AG asserts that counsel for the agencies sent emails to counsel for defendants, requesting that they respond and offering to meet and confer. According to the motion to compel, as of January 2018, Plaintiffs had still not responded to those requests. The AG has requested that the Court order defendants to respond fully to the discovery requests and pay the AG’s costs associated with the motion.