New York Attorney General Letitia James today sued Acima Digital, Acima Holdings, and Acima Solutions (Acima) for deceiving more than 100,000 New York consumers. The Office of the Attorney General's (OAG) lawsuit alleges that Acima violated New York’s rent-to-own law by “leasing” goods that could not be returned, charging more than the allowable amount on goods, and misleading consumers about the cost of financing provided by Acima.
The FTC has shut down Michigan-based Financial Education Services, a credit repair company that the agency says actually was a large pyramid scheme, If approved by a federal judge in the Eastern District of Michigan, the settlement also will return $12 million to consumers harmed by the company, the FTC said. The company, which operated as early as 2015, was temporarily shut down when the FTC first filed suit against it in 2022.
The 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, an annual study conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by IBM, reveals a significant rise in the global average cost of data breaches. The report shows that the average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million in 2024, marking a 10% increase from the previous year. This is the largest annual jump since the pandemic, reflecting the growing disruption that data breaches are causing across various industries.
The Massachusetts’ Consumer Privacy in Commercial Transactions Act (the “Act”) limits companies’ ability to request and collect personal identification information (“PII”) that is not required for a transaction. The Act does not mention ecommerce and predated online retail, but, like many privacy litigation trends, this privacy law is now being tested in the online context.
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: if you are in commercial finance, you need to be thinking about fair lending and anti-discrimination laws. First and foremost, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) applies to both consumer and commercial credit. Indeed, the first sentence of ECOA states that “[i]t shall be unlawful for any creditor to discriminate against any applicant, with respect to any aspect of a credit transaction[,]” on the basis of a protected characteristic. 15 USC § 1691(a) (emphasis added).
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