In response to the growing scourge of identity theft, California enacted its own Identity Theft Law in 2001. The law provides civil remedies to consumers in addition to the criminal remedies against the actual identity thieves. As a practical matter, there is frequently little point in bringing a civil lawsuit against an identity thief. If [...]
Shrouded in mystery for years, the Fair Isaac Company has finally let consumers have a slight peek into the vault of their credit scoring model which is responsible for ?FICO Scores,? otherwise known as your credit score. (FICO, by the way, is a shortened version of ?Fair Isaac Company?.) FICO?s revelation of information comes at [...]
To give consumers more rights against credit card issuers? practices of increasing rates and fees, President Obama signed into act the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009 in May. This act is more commonly know as the Credit Card Act of 2009 and will be implement in three phases. The First Phase [...]
Mortgage servicers are middlemen who process the mortgage payments from homeowners and direct the money to the banks or investors who hold the loans. With the current problems in the mortgage market, banks and the federal governments have reached consensus to help homeowners, but often the mortgage servicers, having the ultimate power to modify a [...]
Forbes Magazine recently published a good article entitled “How to Hold off Debt Collectors.” This article is very helpful for consumers. The article includes a section entitled “Six Consumer Rights Every Debtor Should Know.” Here is a summary of the article. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) receives number of complaints every day about the violations [...]
