The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has to make an important decision soon, about arbitration clauses. Forced arbitration clauses (or “mandatory pre-dispute arbitration clauses” as they are sometimes called) appear in many standard consumer contracts. If you have a Paypal account, a mobile phone contract, a credit card, an employment contract, or if you have purchased… Read more
It is well known that some debt collection attorneys mass produce lawsuits and do so without properly reviewing their own documents. As one former collection attorney, quoted in Jake Halpern’s Bad Paper, put it “[t]here’s no way that you could effectively double-check all that stuff.” Despite slipshod review of the case files, the collection attorney’s… Read more
Ocwen, which has an outsized presence in Maryland and which is the largest subprime mortgage servicer in the United States, has settled allegations by New York’s financial regulator, but still faces trouble in California. It is also in serious financial trouble: its stock closed at $7.71 on January 21, which is down from $16.01 a… Read more
Ocwen is a mortgage servicing company: it’s paid to collect payments from consumers in Maryland and elsewhere, deal with escrow accounts, and sort out any problems that arise. Servicers do not necessarily own the mortgage itself, only the “servicing rights”. The CFPB’s guidance for examining mortgage servicers explains “[t]his is because some entities have expertise… Read more
Maryland debt relief programs won’t do or mean anything without truly understanding the intersectional issues that arise when speaking about debt disparity in the state. Policymakers in Maryland and elsewhere should read “The Debt Disparity: What Drives Credit Card Debt in America”, released in the Fall of 2014 by the think tank Demos (www.demos.org). Demos… Read more
Scammers call and demand immediate payment via wire transfer or prepaid debt card. According to a recent statement from the Maine Attorney General The red flag, however, is that they want you to make an instant payment with a pre-paid debit card or wire transfer. This is how you know you are getting scammed. Hang… Read more
This must-see fantastic video about forced arbitration, also available on YouTube, tells you pretty much everything you need to know about forced arbitration and why and how it is undermining access to justice in the United States. As of the date of writing this blog entry (12/1/2014), the video has less than 7,000 views on… Read more
When it comes to consumer or employment contracts, forced arbitration is a problem in Maryland, and throughout the country. In their April, 2014 article titled “The Strip Mining of Legal Rights” Ralph Nader and Theresa Amato call for limits on the use of fine-print terms to undermine legal rights. They call the use of fine… Read more
Fine print boilerplate is everywhere, but what can be done to stop it? Theresa Amato writes in The Nation that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should take four steps to promote fairness in consumer contracts: Read more
In the Summer, 2014 issue of Washington Monthly, Lina Kahn wrote about how arbitration clauses are used by America’s corporations big and small to shield themselves from lawsuits. For example, suing Target over its loss of customer data to hackers: may seem like an archetypical story of our times, combining corporate misconduct, cyber-crime, and high-stakes… Read more