AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

Auto Fraud and the FTC
NACA is looking for complaints

With a Republican-controlled Congress, consumer advocates expect that there will be very little new consumer-friendly legislation over the next two years. Luckily, the Consumer Financial Protection Act was passed this year, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was established. It will take about a year for the CFPB to be set up, and at least another year before the agencies new rule-making authority can bear fruit, at least on big issues. That being said, the Federal Trade Commission is still in business, and the FTC is collecting information on auto fraud. In July, the FTC gets APA rulemaking authority over car dealers, this authority was the quid pro quo that dealer lobbyists had to accept to get exempted from CFPB regulation. (The dealers' legislative victory may backfire. If they were covered by the CFPB, nothing would really be done for at least two years, and probably longer, because the banks and mortgage industry have to be fixed first.)

Even though the FTC is indicating a new activism, in recent years, when used cars complaints have been made to the FTC, they've tended to vanish, sometimes without even acknowledgement that they were ever received. The FTC blamed the lack of complaint information on defects with their Sentinel system, a system that has stayed rarely used and unfixed for years. With that in mind, the National Association of Consumer Advocates (NACA) is collecting auto fraud complaints from lawyers for forwarding to the FTC. Send your auto fraud complaints to autocomplaints@naca.net. In this particular case, NACA is looking for court filed (or arbitration) complaints alleging auto fraud complaints, primarily in .pdf form. Anything in the last five years is fair game.