On May 13, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under acting director Russell Vought canceled a settlement made with Toyota in 2023 after they illegally directed “thousands of consumers into costly and unwanted product bundles…”
The CFPB itself noted that Toyota failed to provide refunds and made it excessively difficult to cancel the undesirable bundles, with 118,000 consumers connected to a hotline that would try to convince them to not cancel the bundles. As a result, the CFPB made Toyota pay a $12 million fine and $48 million to the car buyers it scammed.
Before Vought’s CFPB came to Toyota’s rescue, the 2023 settlement was supposed to last until about 2028. The CFPB did not bother explaining its decision to drop the settlement.
The former CFPB director, Eric Halperin, who resigned early on the second Trump term, did not mince words in condemning the current CFPB as it relates to this decision and several similar ones:
“The Trump CFPB doesn’t want to just pull back on enforcing the law, it wants to actively reward lawbreakers instead,” he said.
Reuters
