Ftc

They are largely worthless for the individual comsumer. Misconduct must reach a fairly egregious and widespread standard before they will act.

BBB and state level agencies typically garner better results for the individual.

 

The FTC isn't useless...

However, the FTC doesn't have the capability to take action on every single consumer complaint. It takes them to have a clear pattern of behavior which violates the FDCPA, FCRA, etc. for them to be able to take action.

Consider when the FTC took action against NCO for 1.5 MILLION for violations of the FCRA. At $1,000.00 per violation; there was a minimum of 1,500 individual violations which the FTC took action against; keep in mind that that was how many violations that NCO & the FTC negotiated on, the number of substantiated violations would have been a whole lot larger; the FTC said "Hey, to get this over and done with, we'll settle on 1,500 violations, and call it even."

There are ways of getting a little bit more attention with the FTC, if you know how (and if the FTC already had a related case against the company you are going to complain about).

 

If the company already has a settlement with FTC, or with a state AG, it usually includes procedures and record keeping requirements to ensure the company is now actually complying. In effect, they have now agreed that they have to be able to prove they are in compliance, instead of the FTC having to prove they are not, as part of the settlement.

They typically have to file and track ALL consumer complaints for a period of years, and not just related to what they were alleged to have done, and FTC, or the state AG in a settlement, has access to those files to audit their compliance. If FTC starts getting complaints again, and the company's records don't show those complaints, or that they were properly handled, they can be damned by their own records, or even their lack of them. They can't just pretend they never got a complaint, and sweep it under the rug, like they used to.

Willful failure to comply with the terms of their settlement, when approved by the judge in an FTC lawsuit, then can become contempt of court, and a fast track to being shut down, as CAMCO found.

That is why NCO, now subject to such a settlement following FTC charges of re-aging, apparently does not want any trouble with consumer disputes.


Setting up an auditable compliance process, as you might expect, requires that all "complaints", of any sort, be funneled thru a common channel to a designated individual or department in order to be able to track and verify their proper handling. The absense of complaints on file, when the FTC has received reports otherwise, is itself a settlement violation.

Forget "self-incrimination", they "voluntarily" agreed to this in exchange for settlement, sort of like "probation".


Note that other regulated industries, notably those that can affect public health or safety, routinely operate under record keeping requirements that include maintaining and handling all "complaints" or other reports of problems in a manner that can be audited by an external agency. In fact, all businesses with employees in effect must have similar self reported and auditable records for such things as worker's comp, payroll records of hours worked, etc. That is how auditing works: You verify that what you want to control gets routinely reduced to paper, and then you check the paper.


The problem for a CA under this requirement is usually that the systematic compliance violations are so ingrained into all employees thru-out the organization because of how they have operated in the past, that it is difficult to make sure that everyone changes over to legally compliant complaint reporting and forwarding, especially when they have successfully used abuse, harassment, and denial of FDCPA rights as a standard collection tool.

Violating the law when they think they can get away with it trips them up when they also have the legal obligation to field complaints of that very illegal behavior whether they think they did anything wrong or not, especially when an employee knows that will now focus the company's interests on removing the source of the problem to ensure they don't violate their settlement.