Archive for February, 2008

More on walking away from your mortgage from the New York Times. [via Consumerist]

From MSNBC, an interactive map of the attorney general and Better Business Bureau in every state. If you are going to complain, make sure you hit these two, for starters.
[via Consumerist]

It is a good idea to check your property for liens every once in a while, which any title company should be able to do. Otherwise, it may be too late when you finally find out that some unscrupulous debt collector placed a lien on your property for an unsecured credit card debt. If you [...]

Caveat Emptor–buyer beware.
While it isn’t really the law of the land, the public is generally ignorant of the fact that it has rights and there are more than a few judges who are also clueless as to consumer rights, so that too often people get ripped off and abused simply because they don’t know.
A little [...]

Consumer issues should not be “red state-blue state” issues. Everyone is a consumer. Republicans, Democrats, independents, Greens, Libertarians, anarchists . . . Everyone.
Debt collectors are not out to get Democrats, and mortgage brokers are not selling subprime loans only to Republicans. Payday lenders may be targeting evangelical Christians, but they are just as happy to [...]

Sure you owe somebody for your mortgage loan, but who? Since lenders buy and sell loans so frequently, many are unable to prove they own the loans they hold, resulting in as much as $2.1 trillion in “orphan” loans. Says former foreclosure victim Joe Lents: “If you’re going to take my house away from me, [...]

Scammer BlueHippo coughed up $5 million to settle its dispute with the FTC over its uber-expensive, bargain-bin computer “deals.” Next on BlueHippo’s to-do list: settle the class action brought by consumers. [via Consumerist]

People will sprain their ankle at the supermarket and call an attorney before they leave the store, but will endure months of harassment by a debt collector and never call an attorney who can help stop the harassment and get compensation for the resulting emotional harm.
Consumer protection laws are fee-shifting laws, which mean that consumer [...]

According to the Strib, debt collection lawsuits and default judgment filings are skyrocketing, and went up to more than 36,000 for 2007.
36,000!!! For crying out loud. That’s 3,000 per month! And those are just the lawsuits that actually get filed.
[via Consumer Rights Watch]
[photo: Star Tribune]

The economy is tanking, which means it is time to take a good, hard look at your credit card spending habits to see if they are out of control. [CNN]

Cory Doctorow just published a provocative column in the Guardian, “In Defense of Complaining,” in which he argues that complaints, specifically about crippling technology and licensing restrictions, are part of the marketplace in which companies must operate. And he is right. Complaints are the crude way in which consumers tell companies what they want.
Doctorow focuses [...]

Consumer activism is in vogue these days. BusinessWeek just ran a story called “Consumer Vigilantes” about consumers who skip the scripted customer service in Bangalore and instead use the web to put their complaint in front of the people who matter. Consumerist is a consumer’s ally in this, of course, publishing executive phone numbers and [...]

Consumer advocates rejoice. Ralph Nader is running for president. What’s a superdelegate to do? For a rundown of stories click here.

Apparently the money changers are back in the temple.
In a paper to be published this spring in the Catholic University Law Review, professors Christopher Peterson and Steven Graves find a surprising correlation between the geographic density of payday lenders and the political clout of conservative Christians. The more conservative Christians a state has the more [...]

Nearly every store I walk into has a store charge card. Usually the store will offer 10-20% off of your purchase if you sign up for a card. Big deal. According to Bankrate.com, opening a store card account is an automatic 20-point hit to your credit score. Ouch. Why? Because “store credit cards are issued [...]

In another prime example of how the minute the government forgets that it is supposed to be acting for the benefit of we the people, and starts trusting that corporations will watch out for our best interests, we get the beef recall of 143 million pounds from a California meatpacker accused of sending lame [...]

It is getting time for a complete overhaul of the whole housing market in the US, rather than just messing with edges. Two different stories in the Minneapolis StarTribune this morning illustrate why.
First is the story about all the people applying for Section 8 assistance. Recently about 3,700 people took applications, for one of [...]

The legal system and Web 2.0 still seem largely unaware of one another, although that is starting to change as lawyers and consumers make inreasing use of sites like Avvo, Facebook, Wikipediaand mypractice to find lawyers, to network, and to get information about the law.
With that in mind, I created Minnlawpedia, a wiki where [...]

The blogosphere is buzzing with the news that President W signed the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007 into law today, prohibiting the removal of phone numbers from the National Do Not Call Registry. If you have not done so already, add your number to the National Do Not Call Registry.

In case you missed it over Valentine’s Day, Elliot Spitzer, consumer rights hero, wrote a great J’accuse piece in the Washington Post . In the piece, Spitzer rightfully accuses the Bush Administration through the OCC of actually making the predatory lending problem worse by first trying to ignore the problem, then when the States [...]