Friday, January 08, 2010
FTC settles $300K+ judgments with Academy Collection officers for $7,500
In this 2008 case, Academy Collection Service, Inc. and its owner, Keith Dickstein, paid $2.25 million to settle FTC charges that Academy collectors violated the FTC Act and the FDCPA while collecting debts, and that Dickstein failed to stop the violations. Now they settled DOJ and FTC imposed civil penalties of $375,000 and $300,000, respectively, on officers Albert S. Bastian and Keith L. Hurt III, who oversaw Academy’s Las Vegas collection center.
The judgments were suspended upon payment of $7,500 each, based on their ability to pay. The full judgments will become due immediately if the defendants are found to have misrepresented their financial condition.
It’s a shame that they’re allowed to continue to stay in business, but on the bright side, I can’t see how they stay in business WITHOUT resorting to illegal collection practices. I just had a client upload some mp3s of collection calls and all failed to identify themselves as debt collectors and several made it sound like it was extremely important that the call is returned.
We’re STILL working on the Liars and Cheats EXPOSED setup, but are about ready to create blogs for collectors who violate the FDCPA. We’ll post their contact info, some sample calls and letters with violations basics on how to deal with them. This will be very cool!
I’ll post the highlights of the Academy FTC settlement hopefully soon (26 pages!), there’s some good stuff in it.
Below is the 1/7/10 FTC press release:
Continue reading ...
Credit - Collection - Economic News • (0) Comments • Permalink
