John Ayers and LeapLab and Leads Company have reached an official settlement with the FTC regarding their legal trouble related to intentionally acquiring and selling sensitive information connected to Loan Applications. The statement was released by the FTC that confirmed that the defendants were ordered by the federal courts to stop selling or transferring all sensitive, personal information of consumers to any third party.
The FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection director, Jessica Rich, said, “LeapLab purchased sensitive information, including Social security and bank account numbers, from payday loan websites and then sold that information to entities it knew had no legitimate need for it. That allowed scammers to steal millions of dollars from people’s accounts.”
In addition to ending their practices of selling this type of information they are also ordered to destroy all the personal consumer data that they currently have. They have 30 days to complete this order.
The statement from the FTC also illustrated the punitive portion of the settlement, which says, “The orders include a $5.7 million monetary judgement, which is suspended based on the defendants’ sworn inability to pay. In addition to the settlement orders, the court entered an unsuspended $4.1 million default judgment with similar prohibitions against SiteSearch, the remaining defendant in the case.”
The defendants sold the personal account information for about $.50 each to third party non-lenders who had no valid justification for purchasing the information. They had hundreds of thousands of accounts worth of information available. It is not clear at this point exactly how many of them they had sold before they were stopped.
You can read the FTC statement HERE.
