FTC ITMedia Data Misuse Lawsuit Overview:
- Who: ITMedia Solutions LLC has agreed to pay $1.5 million to resolve claims made by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
- Why: The FTC claims ITMedia misused the private and sensitive data of consumers who used loan application websites the company hosted.
- Where: The lawsuit was filed in California federal court.
ITMedia Solutions LLC has agreed to pay $1.5 million to put to bed claims by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that the loan application website sold consumers’ sensitive and private data to third parties.
The FTC claimed that, in addition to selling data that included Social Security numbers, ITMedia misrepresented who it was sharing data with and used applicant credit scores for impermissible marketing purposes.
ITMedia’s alleged actions put it in violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Section 5 of the FCT Act, the agency argued.
The settlement agreement also stipulates that ITMedia, which hosts as many as 200 personal loan and payday loan sites, can no longer engage in “”selling, transferring or otherwise disclosing” consumers’ sensitive information.
ITMedia will only be allowed to share information if it is done to get a consumer a financial product or service they have requested, according to documents.
The company will also no longer be able to use information provided by consumers in non-permissible ways and must now destroy within 30 days any information that has been impermissibly used.
“ITMedia tricked millions of people into giving up sensitive financial information and then sold it to companies that were not making loans,” Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement. “The company’s extraction and misuse of this data broke the law in several ways.”
ITMedia Has Long-Established Practice Of Convincing Consumers To Reveal Personal Information, FTC Says
ITMedia and its affiliates have a long-established practice of convincing consumers to reveal personal information on their loan applications, who believe it will help them obtain loan offers, according to the FTC.
“In reality, ITMedia distributes and sells information from these loan applications as ‘leads’ to a variety of entities without regard to whether these entities are lenders or use the consumers’ data to make loans,” the FTC said.
Last month, a federal judge in Georgia challenged a lawsuit the FTC lobbied at two loan companies and their subsidiaries over claims they swindled millions of dollars from consumers with a coupon scheme.
Did you have your personal information shared or misused by a loan site hosted by ITMedia? Let us know in the comments!
The FTC ITMedia Data Misuse Lawsuit is Federal Trade Commission v. ITMedia Solutions LLC, et al., Case No. 2:22-cv-00073, in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
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2 thoughts onITMedia Solutions Agrees To Pay $1.5 Million To Resolve FTC Claims It Misused, Shared Consumer Data
After applying for a personal loan and being denied, a near 50 offer letters have arrived in my mail promising that I am pre-qualified for a personal loan. The first three I applied, with my special ‘reference code’ online, where apparently my name, address, phone, social security, and other private information was pre-populated in the application form. Ultimately, in each instance I was denied, but then offered a ‘credit card consolidation’ program, where I agree to have a third party to represent my credit card accounts for ‘settlement’ negotiations, paying the provider instead. Given all of the inquires, there has been a significant lowering of my credit score, and as a result, makes it all that more difficult to be approved by a legitimate personal loan company.
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