Financial and Investment Fraud
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December 22, 2015
Participants in an alleged credit card “laundering” scheme have agreed to settle FTC charges that they illegally helped provide access to payment networks, thereby enabling scammers to place bogus charges on consumers’ credit cards. According to the FTC’s complaint, PayBasics, Todd Hatch and Jimmy Shin helped the defendants behind the Tax Club fraud to open and maintain merchant accounts used to process credit card payments for sales made by a number of different third-party scammers. The defendants in the Tax Club work at home scheme settled FTC charges last year. FTCDecember 16, 2015
The CFPB ordered EZCORP, Inc., a small-dollar lender, to refund $7.5 million to 93,000 consumers, pay $3 million in penalties, and stop collection of remaining payday and installment loan debts owed by roughly 130,000 consumers for illegal debt collection practices. The CFPB found that EZCORP collected debts from consumers through unlawful in-person collection visits at their homes or workplaces, risked exposing consumers’ debts to third parties, falsely threatened consumers with litigation for non-payment of debts, and unfairly made multiple electronic withdrawal attempts from consumer accounts, causing mounting bank fees. CFPBNovember 20, 2015
The New Jersey Bureau of Securities filed legal action against, and separately revoked the registrations of, two individuals who are alleged to have defrauded over 170 investors out of millions of dollars in a scheme involving investment in a Florida condominium complex called Esplanade at Millennia Condominiums. NJNovember 18, 2015
The CFPB filed an administrative lawsuit against an online lender, Integrity Advance, LLC, and its CEO, James R. Carnes, for deceiving consumers about the cost of short-term loans. The suit seeks redress for harmed customers, injunctive relief, and a civil monetary penalty. CFPBOctober 26, 2015
The operators of an advance fee recovery scheme that falsely claimed it could recover money for consumers that they had lost to telemarketing scams will be banned from selling recovery services, and from telemarketing, under a court order. The court order resolves a 2014 FTC complaint that charged Consumer Collection Advocates and Michael Robert Ettus with illegally collecting money from consumers, many of them elderly people harmed by timeshare resale and precious metal investment frauds. FTCOctober 5, 2015
The head of a sham debt relief operation agreed to a judgment of more than $7.9 million to settle FTC charges that he deceived consumers and charged them thousands of dollars while providing nothing in return. In a complaint filed in May 2014, the FTC alleged that the DebtPro 123 LLC defendants falsely told consumers their programs would settle all of their debts and repair their credit. Then they told them to stop paying and communicating with creditors, which led to more debt and worse credit because of accrued interest, late charges, creditor lawsuits, garnished wages, and sometimes bankruptcy. FTCAugust 10, 2015
A New Hampshire investment advisor was sentenced to up to 7 years in prison for fraud. Richard M. Higgins plead guilty to one felony count of engaging in a course of conduct involving a scheme to defraud in connection with the purchase and sale of securities, and one felony count of a course of business that operated as fraud in connection with acting as an investment advisor. Beginning in late 2006 and continuing through August 2007, Higgins solicited investors for a pooled investment in the form of a limited partnership, making a number of false and misleading statements. Higgins then further defrauded the investors by providing them quarterly statements which regularly overstated the performance of their investments. NHAugust 7, 2015
The FTC charged a data broker operation, including Sequoia One LLC and Gen X Marketing Group LLC, with illegally selling payday loan applicants’ financial information to a scam operation that took millions of dollars from consumers by debiting their bank accounts and charging their credit cards without their consent. According to the FTC’s complaint, the data broker enterprise bought loan applications from the operators of payday loan websites, and got others directly from consumers via their own payday loan websites. Instead of passing on those applications to legitimate payday lenders, the defendants sold the information to companies that raided the consumers’ accounts for at least $7.1 million. FTCWall Street Still Behaving Badly
Posted 05/21/15
By the C|C Whistleblower Lawyer Team
In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, there was both a public and private battle cry of "Never Again!" Dodd-Frank was passed with its sweeping regulations to keep Wall Street in check, and federal and state enforcers went on regulatory rampage extracting 9 and10-figure settlements from a who's who list of the world's top financial firms. Not many Wall Street...