Recent Articles

About a year ago, I filed on behalf of clients a lawsuit against National Legal Staffing Support LLC, Kevin Mason and V. Stuart Goldberg regarding a student loan debt settlement operation.  That was an individual law suit which is still pending as I write this. Since then I have received a number of calls from […]

When I worked for UAW Legal Services Plans, very often I would have a client come in with a timeshare that he/she couldn’t afford.  That experience made me really hate timeshares. What I hate worse than timeshares are the scammy companies who get money from desperate timeshare owners and generally do nothing. Fifteen years ago […]

Just when I thought the pension assignment industry was dead, they keep popping back up. The current problem seems to be collection effords driven by the “investors” who purchase the pension assignments.  I have beeen dealing with these cases since 2014.  Below is from a blog entry that I wrote initially in 2015.  In my […]

I received two calls last week from people in different states who are facing renewed collection activty on Great Seneca Financial Corporation judgments dating from as far back as 2003.  I have written about Great Seneca before. The thing to remember is that Great Seneca and a numbrer of associated companies are defunct, dead, ceased […]

For years consumer lawyers were telling authorities that banks were working with car dealers to fleece minority buyers, fleece them by charging minority group buyers more for interest than non-minority buyers.  Ally Financial was tagged to pay $98 million in a settlement regarding overcharges in 2013.  (Don’t feel bad for Ally, they got $16 BILLION […]

When researching for a current case, I found a Chicago Tribune article from 1997 about a case I was working on back then concerning finance charges hidden in the price of subprime auto contracts.  Subsequent court decisions has made this type of case much harder to bring, but the practice still continues at dealerships across […]

We just completed an analysis of two months of suits filed by Nextgear Capital, Inc. in Hamilton County, Indiana. Nextgear filed 127 cases.  Of those cases, only 9 defendants hired an attorney. Six hired an assortment of other attorneys, and three hired us.  Only seven percent of Nextgear defendants hired an attorney. Of the cases […]

A year ago, my co-counsel Keith Hagan and I were interviewed by WRTV-6 reporter Kara Kenney regarding the case we filed against Asta Funding et al, a case that internally we call “The Case of Great Seneca’s Ghost”, alleging the defendants are attempting to collect judgments in the names of dead companies. Kara did an […]

I have fielded a number of complaints about the interaction between dealer floorplanning company Nextgear Capital and Manheim Auctions.  Both Nextgear and Manheim are units of Cox Enterprises, Inc. To give you some perspectives: in the modern-day car business, buying and selling vehicles at auctions is essential.  Because of the marketplace nature of auctions, once […]

The CFPB has proposed a final rule that prohibits a lot of the worst practices in the Payday Loan industry as well as practices involving Auto Title Loans and other abusive loans.  These regulations are primarily intended to get people out of the “debt trap” that happens when you are forced to roll over payday […]