The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) recently took action against Davit Gasparyan and Dmitry Fomichev, two co-founders of an online lead aggregator company that sold consumer loan applications without safeguards. Jim Nussle, President and CEO of the Credit Union National Association (CUNA), commended the bureau’s actions in a statement:
“The CFPB took action against individuals who operated T3Leads, an unsupervised, nonbank entity operating in the financial marketplace, which was engaging in egregious abuse of consumers when reselling loan applications containing sensitive personal data to lenders and data brokers without assessing the sources of those leads or the purchasers to which they sold. These actions, according to the CFPB, have exposed millions of consumers to fraudulent and abusive debt collection tactics and took advantage of consumers’ lack of understanding of risks and costs. We commend the CFPB for these efforts to weed bad actors out of the financial marketplace, and urge them to continue this focus on duplicitous behavior, rather than creating sweeping regulations that penalize responsible actors like credit unions.”