When Paul DeMuth fell behind on his student loan payments, he started receiving collection calls from Navient, formerly part of Sallie Mae. They called multiple times a day and even when he asked them to stop, they kept coming. He turned to Kimmel & Silverman for help and filed suit. An independent arbitrator found Navient…
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, debt collectors contacting third parties to locate debtors must show that the contact was purely to locate the debtor. In this case, Patricia Evankavitch, the Plaintiff, filed a lawsuit against the debt collection agency Green Tree after…
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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has released its 2015 Annual Report, providing an in-depth look at the thousands of consumer complaints received by the Bureau in 2014. A staggering 88,300 complaints, 35% of those made to the CFPB, related to debt collectors and, if taken as factually accurate, each and every one violates Fair…
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When Albert Nigro contacted National Grid to end electrical service to his deceased mother-in-law’s New York home, he never expected to be bombarded with automated collection calls for someone else’s debt. So how does a man wind up in the sights of a debt collector’s auto-dialer for a bill that isn’t his own? During his…
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Have you been receiving pre-recorded messages or automated phone calls to your cellphone from debt collectors? It seems you’re not the only one. Last month, USCB Inc., a receivable and resource management company, agreed to a $2.75 million settlement that will be paid out to roughly 12,000 consumers in order to resolve a Telephone Consumer Protection…
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A Maryland federal judge has refused to dismiss a class action accusing Burger King Corp. of sending unsolicited fax advertisements in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Judge Paul Grimm of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland denied Burger King’s motion to dismiss the proposed class action or strike the class…
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Are you being contacted by phone and mail about a debt that you owe but haven’t paid or can’t pay? Maybe you are being called about somebody else’s debt? Does it seem like your phone won’t stop ringing or that you are threatened that calls will continue until you have cash to pay? Do you…
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Consumers across the country say they are being harassed into paying bills they don’t owe to a company that no longer exists. And it’s not the first time. Hollywood Video and its parent company, Movie Gallery, went out of business in 2010 and declared bankruptcy. About 3 million U.S. residents owed money to the firm…
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One of the nation’s largest debt collectors, Allied Interstate, was charged by the Federal Trade Commission for making repeated collection calls to collect from the wrong person, to collect the wrong amount or both. Allied has agreed to pay $1.75 million in the settlement, which is the second largest civil penalty obtained by the FTC…
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