Mutual Consolidated Savings Busted for Fraud
ByHere’s something you don’t see every day – a shady debt relief company getting smacked around for defrauding desperate consumers.
It seems Mutual Consolidated Savings conducted an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at consumers who were drowning in credit card debt. The campaign hawked a service, called the Rapid Debt Reduction program, which promised to lower interest rates and allow consumers to pay off debt in half the time.
Now, get this – consumers had to pay between $690 and $899 for the program. If you’re already drowning in debt, that’s a hefty fee.
So the company failed to reduce interest rates as promised, and then reneged on their supposed money-back guarantee.
Oh, and they called numbers on the Do Not Call registry, used fake Caller ID numbers and used pre-recorded “robo-calls” to market their service.
The Tacoma, Washington company now has to pay back $1.5 million (all of its available assets) to the consumers it defrauded. Now, this kind of sucks, because they bilked almost $22.5 million from consumers… so the people who signed up for the Rapid Debt Reduction Program will only get a fraction their money back.
Still, the people behind Mutual Consolidated Savings and the Rapid Debt Reduction program are barred from ever working in the debt relief industry again. So at least that’s something.
It’s good to see a company like Mutual Consolidated Savings go down. It galls me, though, that there’s no mention of prison time (or at least shoving a pineapple up the CEO’s ass). Ah, well… at least there’s one less cockroach out there profiting off of consumers’ desperation.
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