Skip to main content
Menu Icon
Close

InfoBytes Blog

Financial Services Law Insights and Observations

FTC Files Complaint Against Operators of Online Discount Clubs and Payment Processors for Allegedly Debiting More Than $40 Million from Consumers Without Their Consent

Consumer Finance FTC Telemarketing Sales Rule Fraud UDAP

Consumer Finance

On August 16, the FTC issued a press release announcing charges against the operators of a group of marketing entities and payment processors (defendants) for allegedly violating numerous laws when they enrolled consumers into online discount clubs and debited more than $40 million from consumers’ bank accounts for membership without their authorization. According to the August 15 complaint, several of the defendants promoted their respective online discount club through websites and telemarking calls to offer services to consumers in need of payday, cash advance, or installment loans. Other defendants then used “Remotely Created Payment Orders” and “Remotely Created Checks” without the consumers’ authorization to debit their bank accounts for the initial application fee as well as automatically-recurring monthly fees. Notably, during the period when one of the discount clubs was launched, several of the defendants were facing contempt proceedings for allegedly violating a 2008 stipulated final order with the FTC in another deceptive debiting scam. The defendants purportedly, among other things, (i) engaged in unfair billing practices; (ii) made false, misleading, and deceptive statements when they represented, “directly or indirectly,” to consumers seeking refunds that they were not entitled to a refund because the entities possessed personal and financial information, which served to confirm that the consumers agreed to “purchase the products or services” or authorize money to be debited from their bank accounts; and (iii) provided “substantial assistance or support” in the way of payment processing services while knowing—or “consciously avoiding knowing”—that the actions being supported were in violation of the Telemarketing Sales Rule. The FTC also claims that hundreds of thousands of consumers called to cancel their memberships and request refunds, with thousands more informing their banks about the unauthorized debits. Additionally, more than 99.5 percent of consumers enrolled in a discount clubs apparently never accessed a single coupon—“the only service for which they had supposedly paid.”