CRL in the News

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new director said Wednesday that she plans to use the agency's tools to focus on preventing consumer harm, outlining an agenda that includes rethinking the supervisory...

DURHAM – Karen Turrentine, 66, a former hairdresser, retired in 2004 because she suffers with lupus, scleroderma, and rheumatoid arthritis. Turrentine said she was just getting over a bout of sickness when she was threatened with eviction following an altercation with a neighbor.

RALEIGH, N.C. — A bill to increase bounced check fees, and double some loan origination fees, moved forward at the statehouse Tuesday with a boost from House Republican leadership. House Bill 327 would increase the state cap on returned check fees from $25 to $35, raising that fee for the first time in more than 20 years.

One rainy afternoon early in February 2018, a procession of consumer experts and activists made their way to the headquarters of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington to meet Mick Mulvaney, then the bureau’s acting director. The building — an aging Brutalist layer cake, selected by the bureau’s founders for the aspirational symbolism of its proximity to the White...

According to a recent report by the Center for Responsible Lending, in our County, we have 12 payday stores which annually drain over 2M in fees from consumers, the majority of whom have low incomes, are people of color, and reside in 48197/98. The maxim “it costs more to be poor” has never been more evident than in how payday...

At a recent hearing on Capitol Hill about higher education, Rep. Virginia Foxx of North Carolina complained about the attention given to problems with for-profit colleges. She said, "To sit here and grind a tired old ax against certain types of institutions you don't like is just disgraceful." But for-profit colleges have a bad reputation for good reason. And in...

Payday lenders like tax season. That’s because they know a good number of people will come to them to cash refund checks, and they will collect a nice bounty in fees. A quick Google search finds all sorts of such companies touting how easy they make it for people to get their tax money. It can be tempting for those...

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., has been fighting for more than a decade to ban bank practices such as the overdraft fees that spurred a Wachovia customer's class action lawsuit in 2008. Melanie Garcia's complaint in federal court in Miami accused the Charlotte, N.C.-based lender, which was taken over by Wells Fargo later the same year, of re-ordering her checking account...

Two years since its launch in the U.S., Amazon Cash, Amazon’s reloadable prepaid card, faces adoption hurdles. The payment method initially rolled out as a feature to help unbanked or underbanked customers (those who don’t have bank accounts or don’t rely on their bank accounts for a majority of their transactions) shop on Amazon. To use Amazon Cash, customers log...

In the waning days of the Obama administration, Deutsche Bank made a series of unusually frank admissions in a U.S. court filing. The German bank acknowledged that during the housing boom it made intentionally false representations to buyers of its mortgage-backed securities, concealing the actual risks from purchasers of the bonds. It lied, for example, about borrowers’ credit scores. It...