Debt collection

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday hit Citigroup with $8 million in fines and restitution for allegedly selling credit card debt with inflated interest rates and failing to send consumer payments to debt buyers.

Violations of state and local debt collection statutes aren’t violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Monday.

A TransUnion analysis found that prior evictions and rental-related collection records are highly predictive of future evictions.

Taiwan-based computer hardware maker ASUSTeK Computer Inc. agreed to settle FTC charges that critical security flaws in its routers put the home networks of hundreds of thousands of consumers at risk.

A bill passed by the Wisconsin state legislature last week alters consumer law to ease regulations for debt collectors.

A recent story published by media in Houston stated that a Texas man had been arrested for failing to pay his student loan debts. In fact, the man, Paul Aker, was arrested for failing to appear in court.

Many consumers expecting a tax refund this year will use it to pay down debt or save the money, according to the National Retail Federation’s annual Tax Returns Survey.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's use of enforcement actions to try and make broad changes to the auto lending market is fragmenting the industry further and potentially limiting a consumer's ability to negotiate for a lower interest rate.

Wisconsin lawmakers are reviewing a plan to send Milwaukee County’s debt to the state’s Department of Revenue for collection.

An estimated 6,200 accounts at Western Missouri Medical Center in Warrensburg, Mo. were inadvertently sent to a collection agency because of a computer glitch.

Banks are still holding on to scores of delinquent mortgages that date to the real estate crash, but a surge in home values across the country is motivating them to move the most troublesome loans off their books more quickly.

A group of defendants have settled FTC charges that they provided scammers with hundreds of thousands of consumers’ sensitive personal information – including Social Security and bank account numbers.

The FTC sent a summary of its 2015 work on debt collection practices to the CFPB to include in the CFPB’s annual report to Congress on the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The FTC and the CFPB share enforcement responsibilities under the FDCPA.

FCRA and TCPA cases were much higher in January compared with January 2015 (+31.4% and +39.8% respectively) but that follows a multi-year trend for the two statutes that doesn’t seem to be easing, according to data collected from U.S. district courts.

For the last nine months, marketplace lenders have been hoping the Supreme Court would save them from a lower-court ruling that raised fundamental questions about their business model.

A Pennsylvania federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit accusing debt collector LMM Management of using the letterhead of an allegedly sham law firm to convince thousands of borrowers to pay delinquent debts.

In our first piece on collecting through litigation, we noted that the soft financial market and uneven regulatory landscape have led to a great deal of waste and loss of profitability in collecting unpaid debt. Now, we describe new systems that will employ technology to help litigation processes and return them to profitability.

The FTC and the State of Florida have obtained settlements with a group of defendants who participated in a tech support scheme that allegedly defrauded thousands of consumers out of millions of dollars.

Legal collections took a backseat to other financial processes in the wake of the recession. But with the job market showing strength and the related assumption that defaulting borrowers are regaining the capacity to pay back debt, it’s expected collection revenue via litigation will grow in 2016.

The IRS won't meet the March 1 deadline to sign contracts with private debt collection agencies to collect unpaid tax debt.