Finance Globe

One of the nation’s largest debt collection companies has agreed to pay $1.75 million to settle charges by the Federal Trade Commission that the company used unethical practices to collect debts, the agency reported on Thursday.The settlement, which is not an indication that the company broke the law or has been found guilty of wrongdoing, is the second largest civil penalty obtained by the FTC in a debt collection case.The FTC alleged that Allied Interstate, Inc.,...

A health care fraud racket suspected of pilfering more than $163 million from the Medicare system has been busted up by the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigations in a multi-agency investigation, the agency reported on Wednesday.The defendants include 73 members and associates of an Armenian-American organized crime enterprise across five states - California, Georgia, New Mexico, New York, and Ohio.“The emergence of international organized crime in domestic health care fraud schemes signals a...

The mortgage mess that started with bad paperwork to put people into homes looks to be continuing in the same manner, only this time it’s to get many of those very same people out of their homes.Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller is leading the investigation into reports that some of the largest mortgage servicers in the country engaged in practices that violated the law, specifically, using “robo-signers” to authorize thousands of foreclosure documents, and falsifying notary...

The unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.6% and approximately 14.8 million people were unemployed in September, the Labor Department reported on Friday. Non-farm employment dropped by 95,000 in September after a loss of 159,000 in government employment and an addition of 64,000 in private-sector positions. The steep decline in government jobs reflected the end of temporary Census 2010 positions as well as job losses in local government. Among the major worker groups as defined by the...

Consumers continue to get a better grip on their credit card and other debt in the second quarter of 2010, the American Bankers Association reported on Wednesday.Delinquencies in bank credit cards decreased to the lowest level since the first quarter of 2001 at 3.62% of all accounts. Also, non-card revolving loans - which have the lowest delinquency rate of all loan types tracked by the ABA - fell to 1.21% in the second quarter.The ABA defines...

A new turnkey program will help community banks offer prepaid credit cards to their customers, the American Bankers Association reported on Wednesday.Business Solutions, a subsidiary of the ABA, will offer a variety of Prepaid MasterCard products, including general purpose reloadable, payroll, and gift cards. TransCard, a leader in prepaid credit card processing, and Business Solutions will team up to help small banks bring in new revenue through a large, untapped customer base, the ABA said.“This is...

A “tax relief” operation based in Beverly Hills has been halted from doing business by a federal judge at the request of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency reported on Tuesday.The FTC accuses American Tax Relief, LLC of ripping off financially distressed consumers - to the tune of $60 million - by fraudulently promising they can reduce the taxpayers’ debt to the IRS.Not surprisingly, the company’s own California state business license was suspended last year for...

The unemployment rate in August was lower than it was a year ago for 182 out of 372 metropolitan areas tracked by the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the agency reported on Wednesday.The BLS also said that the unemployment rate was higher than it was a year ago in 169 areas and stayed the same in 21 metros.For August, 124 metropolitan areas had jobless rates of at least 10%, eight fewer than there was...

The Federal Trade Commission has halted an operation that’s fraudulently taken millions of dollars from consumers by placing bogus charges on their phone bills, the agency reported on Thursday.Inc21 has been ordered by a U.S. District court to pay back almost $38 million to consumers as a result of the FTC’s effort to halt this huge scam. The FTC alleged that Inc21 hired offshore telemarketers to call prospective clients to sell Web-based services. The company then...

The Federal Trade Commission announced on Wednesday that they will be mailing 360 consumer redress checks to customers of Briggs & Baker, a company that advertised it could “drastically” reduce consumers’ credit card debt.The FTC alleged that the company’s ads were false and misleading, and says that customers who signed up for their debt negotiation services ended up with worse credit ratings and a higher debt load. Some of Brigg’s & Bakers customers even became the...