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A one-time payday-loan mogul was indicted on federal charges that he made up millions of fake debts and sold them to bill collectors, victimizing people across the country, Bloomberg news reported. Joel Tucker was able to pull off the scheme because he already had his victims’ personal information from loan applications, according to an indictment unsealed June 29 in Kansas City, Mo. But many of those people never took loans, let alone failed to pay them back, and Tucker didn’t own the loans anyway, prosecutors said. From 2014 to 2016, he earned $7.3 million from packaging and selling the information to collectors, they said. Tucker was charged with interstate transportation of stolen money, bankruptcy fraud and falsifying bankruptcy records, counts that carry sentences of as much as 20 years each. The indictment, dated June 5, was unsealed on Friday after Tucker was arrested in Kansas.

Mick Mulvaney, head of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, cut in half a fine that his Obama-era predecessor sought against a payday lender and dropped some of the agency’s earlier claims in the case, Reuters reported. Mulvaney, appointed by President Donald Trump, has vowed to dial back what he says is overreach by the independent agency, which was created following the 2007-2009 financial crisis to stamp out predatory lending. The CFPB fined South Carolina-based lender Security Finance $5 million on June 13 for harassing borrowers when collecting debt and mishandling credit report data. Richard Cordray, Mulvaney’s predecessor, had wanted to seek additional charges against the company for pushing borrowers to buy personal insurance that was bundled into loans. Cordray wanted Security Finance to pay $11 million, with $3 million as a penalty for the debt collection and credit reporting abuses and at least $8 million to compensate consumers who felt pushed into insurance. Mulvaney dropped the insurance claims, meaning the settlement with Security Finance leaves no money for customers Cordray wanted to remediate. Reuters reported in March that Mulvaney was reviewing the case.

Mick Mulvaney could be around for a while as the acting chief of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, despite the Trump administration’s move to nominate a permanent successor, the Wall Street Journal reported. The White House yesterday said that it would nominate Kathy Kraninger to run the 1,700-person agency created after the financial crisis. Kraninger quickly ran into opposition from the left and right, with many critics saying that she wasn’t qualified for the job. She currently works as an associate director at the Office of Management and Budget for Mulvaney, who also serves as White House budget chief. Some experts said that it appeared the Trump administration was putting up a nominee who might not be confirmed by the Senate, effectively creating a pathway for Mulvaney to stay at the CFPB for as long as two more years. Kraninger’s nomination allows him to stay until at least the end of 2018 while her confirmation is pending in the Senate.

For years, a South Carolina lender “humiliated and harassed” customers by directing its employees to approach them at their homes, jobs or even at grocery stores to collect on debts, according to a government settlement announced yesterday, the Washington Post reported. Between 2011 and 2016, Security Group either attempted or completed these in-person collection visits more than 12 million times, targeting 1.3 million customers, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Some consumers were threatened with jail, shoved or “physically blocked” from leaving private property, according to a consent order. Security Group, which offers short-term, high-cost loans, agreed to a relatively small fine, $5 million. But it denied any wrongdoing.

In a joint filing in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, the Community Financial Services Association of America and the CFPB asked that the effective date of the payday lending rule be delayed until a new rule is issued or the lawsuit is resolved, the Credit Union Times reported. The two groups asked that all proceedings in the lawsuit be placed on hold. And if the lawsuit is revived in the future, the two sides asked that implementation of the payday loan rule be delayed until 445 days after the final ruling. Both sides agree that the association and its affiliates have “presented ‘a substantial case on the merits’ on at least some of their claims.” That is a reversal from previous agency defense of the rules. A large portion of the rules are scheduled to go into effect in August 2019. But the agency’s decision to revisit the rule has created a tremendous amount of uncertainty in the industry, the two sides agreed. “There is no way to know whether plaintiffs’ members will ultimately need to comply with the payday rule, a modified payday rule, or no rule at all,” the agency and the trade group said.

President Trump has repealed auto-lending guidance from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), revoking a rule that was put in place to protect minority customers from predatory practices, The Hill reported. Trump’s signature on a congressional resolution erases the CFPB’s 2013 guidance targeting “dealer markups,” the additional interest that is added to a customer’s third-party auto loan as compensation for the dealer. Auto dealers, banks and their allies in Congress said that the CFPB policy was an unfair and unfounded attack on an essential and harmless financing tool. Republicans and a small group of Democrats voted to repeal the CFPB guidance under what is known as the Congressional Review Act (CRA). That law allows a simple majority of lawmakers in the House and Senate to vote to repeal a federal rule; it also bans the agency from replacing a rule with a similar measure in the future. The resolution cleared the House earlier this month after clearing the Senate in April.

Tougher rules governing the payday lending industry, finalized during the last weeks of an Obama-era appointee who led the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will remain in place for now after Congress allowed a deadline to overrule them pass without action, the Associated Press reported. Despite the lack of Congressional action, the bureau, now under the control of Trump appointee Mick Mulvaney, has already announced plans to revisit the regulations, which mostly go into effect next year. Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress had 60 legislative days to overrule the CFPB's new payday lending rules, which were implemented in the final weeks of Richard Cordray's tenure. The deadline expired on Wednesday without a vote in either the House or Senate. The cornerstone of the rules is a requirement that payday lenders must determine, before giving a loan, whether a borrower can afford to repay it in full, with interest, within 30 days. The rules would have also capped the number of loans a person could take out in a certain period of time.

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will move the agency’s student loan division into the bureau’s consumer information unit, a shift that career officials fear will sidetrack a major enforcement case the agency is pursuing against Navient, the nation’s largest student loan collector, the New York Times reported. The change, outlined in an email sent to the bureau’s staff yesterday, is part of an effort by Mulvaney to refocus the agency away from its consumer finance enforcement and rule-writing mission and more toward providing consumers with information about their legal rights. It follows a similar move Mulvaney made in February, when he folded the bureau’s fair lending division into the consumer unit, telling staff it would “continue to focus on advocacy, coordination and education.”

Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives yesterday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign, the New York Times reported. Mulvaney, who also runs the White House budget office, is a longtime critic of the Obama-era consumer bureau, including while serving in Congress. He was tapped by President Trump in November to temporarily run the bureau, in part because of his promise to sharply curtail it. Since then, he has frozen all new investigations and slowed down existing inquiries by requiring employees to produce detailed justifications. He also sharply restricted the bureau’s access to bank data, arguing that its investigations created online security risks. And he has scaled back efforts to go after payday lenders, auto lenders and other financial services companies accused of preying on the vulnerable.

The House is aiming to vote to repeal the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) policy on auto-loan financing during the week of May 7, The Hill reported. Aides to House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) laid out that plan while discussing the House agenda at a last week. The resolution to repeal the CFPB auto-lending guidance, which passed the Senate on Wednesday, is almost certain to clear the House and be signed into law by President Trump. The CFPB policy will likely be the first informal regulation to be repealed by Congress through the Congressional Review Act. Congress has used the Congressional Review Act (CRA) more than a dozen times since 2017 to repeal formal rules issued under former President Obama, but never to revoke guidance.