On February 6, 2018, a Kansas state court entered a default judgment against a Florida student debt relief company banning it from doing business in Kansas and ordering it to pay over $39,000 back to one consumer. Kansas Attorney General Derek Schmidt (“Kansas AG”) had accused the company of violating the Kansas…
On February 7, 2018, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) announced an enforcement action against a student loan debt relief operation, claiming it deceived consumers out of $28 million by falsely promising that their monthly payments would go towards their student loans. In the complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern…
On February 7, 2018, Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring (Virginia AG) announced a settlement with a Virginia based online lender for alleged violations of the Virginia Consumer Protection Act. The lender allegedly offered closed-end, installment loans online and falsely claimed it was licensed in Virginia to do so. According to the…
On January 31, 2018, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (D.C. Circuit), sitting en banc, issued its long-awaited decision in PHH Corp. v. CFPB, holding that the provision of the Dodd-Frank Act shielding the single director of the CFPB from removal without cause is constitutional. In all,…
On February 2, 2018, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (the “Board”) announced that it would restrict the growth of a national bank based on its past consumer abuses and compliance failures and its need to remedy deficiencies in its management oversight of sales practices. The Board issued a…
On January 25, 2018, a Florida-based homebuilder filed its Form 10-K annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), disclosing that its “mortgage subsidiary has been subpoenaed by the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) regarding the adequacy of certain underwriting and quality control processes related to Federal Housing Administration (FHA)…
In August 2016, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California granted partial summary judgment to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in a federal lawsuit against a California-based online payday lender, its individual owner, its subsidiary, and a servicer of its loans (“Defendants”), where the CFPB alleged that…
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…
On December 19, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a motion to compel discovery responses and for the production of documents in a case the FTC filed against a student loan debt relief company and its owner in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The FTC claims that the student…
On December 8, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that it had settled allegations that a Louisiana-based mortgage lender violated the False Claims Act (FCA) through its underwriting of Federal Housing Administration (FHA)-insured mortgage loans. In the lawsuit, which is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas, the…