Tag: Bureau of Consumer Protection

Two Nevada companies and two individuals have agreed to stop charging consumers thousands of dollars to apply for multiple credit cards in their names in order to pay for expensive and often ineffective training programs under a proposed settlement of a Federal Trade Commission lawsuit.

The FTC filed a federal court complaint along with a proposed settlement which requires the defendants to stop obtaining credit cards for consumers for a fee. In addition, the defendants will be required to pay $2.1 million under the proposed settlement, which will be distributed by the FTC to consumers.

In September 2021, The Federal Trade Commission sent checks totaling more than $2 million to consumers who were harmed by the company.

The owner and operator of Inmate Magazine Service, a company that scammed prisoners and their families by charging them for magazine subscriptions that either showed up late or not at all, will be permanently banned from selling or marketing magazine subscriptions.

Under the terms of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission and the Florida Office of Attorney General, Roy Snowden, who owned and operated a number of businesses that operated as Inmate Magazine Service, will also be required to surrender the contents of multiple bank accounts.

The FTC and Florida’s complaint against Snowden and his companies alleged that they marketed magazine subscriptions to consumers serving prison sentences, as well as their families, offering to send the magazines to the prisoners while they were incarcerated and promising the magazines would arrive within 120 days.

In many cases, the magazines never arrived or were delivered far later than promised, with no notification to the consumers about delayed shipment or the chance to cancel their orders as required by the FTC’s Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule. The complaint also alleged that consumers were almost never able to contact the company to request refunds or status updates on orders.

In 2018, the FTC and State of New York alleged that Campbell Capital, LLC and its owner, Robert Heidenreich, along with a number of other related companies, collected payments on debts from consumers that exceeded the amounts they allegedly owed. The defendants in the case were able to collect these funds by allegedly using tactics such as threatening that consumers would be arrested or served with legal papers at work if they did not make payments immediately. In some cases, according to the suit filed by the FTC and New York, the collectors pretended to be sheriff’s office employees or process servers when making such threats in phone calls with consumers.

Heidenreich agreed to a settlement with the FTC and New York in February 2020 that permanently banned him from the debt collection industry and required him to turn over funds to be used to provide refunds to affected consumers. In total, $19,826.64 will be sent to consumers, with each receiving a check for $32.88.