FTC Bans Owners of Online Payday Lending Operations from Consumer Lending Industry

FTC Payday Lending Enforcement

On July 7, the FTC entered into settlement agreements with two individuals and the entities they operate seeking to permanently restrict them from doing business in the consumer lending industry. According to the FTC’s complaint filed in September 2014, the defendants allegedly operated an online payday lending scheme using personal financial information purchased from third-party lead generators or data brokers to make unauthorized deposits and withdrawals into consumers’ bank accounts, regardless of whether or not the consumer applied for a payday loan. Once the loan proceeds were placed into the consumers’ accounts, the defendants would withdraw “finance charges” from the accounts on a recurring basis, but would not credit the loans’ principal balances for those payments. Collectively, the defendants issued $28 million in payday loans, and extracted over $46.5 million from consumers’ bank accounts over an 11-month period. In addition to being banned from the consumer lending industry, the proposed agreements also order the defendants to pay approximately $52 million in restitution (subject to certain conditions), dismiss any consumer debt that may be owed, and prohibit the defendants from reporting such debts to any credit reporting agency or benefiting from the collection of customers’ personal information.