Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)

The recently created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has been compiling complaints on credit card companies since December 2011; most of people’s complaints on credit cards deal with billing and account issues (of 94,000 total). 1,600 credit card company complaints involve debt collection issues.The CFPB gathers complaints through the Consumer Response complaint system, which was initally set up by the Federal Trade Commission. The CFPB publicly released all of the complaint data it has compiled so far, in late March, 2013. The agency hopes to soon be updating the data and releasing it more steadily. You can search the records by company or issue (with many subcategories therein).Not surprisingly, more than a third of the records released have the word “collection” somewhere in their search fields; the collection arm of companies (and their associated debt collection agencies) are usually the most aggressive and hardest to find some sort of “customer service” from. What’s encouraging about the CFPB’s database is that is requires companies to respond to consumer complaints immediately, and the CFPB follows up with people to make sure they received satisfaction—if not, this too is recorded.If a collection agency has harassed you, you may be entitled to money damages up to $1,000.00, based on the FDCPA, which has been around for almost 35 years. The FDCPA is a federal law that applies to every state. In other words, everyone is protected by the FDCPA. The FDCPA is essentially a laundry list of what debt collectors can and cannot do while collecting a debt, as well as things debt collectors must do while collecting a debt. Plus, the FDCPA has a fee-shift provision. This means, the collection agency pays your attorney’s fees and costs. Founding attorney, Michael Agruss, has settled over 1,500 debt collection harassment cases. We want to help you, too.