The Federal Trade Commission has announced a settlement with a lead generation company and its owner that will see them banned from making robocalls or calls to numbers on the Do Not Call list after they were accused of operating more than 50 sites designed to trick consumers into providing their personal information for mortgage refinancing loans and other services.
- The company, Response Tree, and its owner, Derek Thomas Doherty, were also fined $7 million, but that was suspended due to their inability to repay it.
The Background: The defendants operated websites like PatriotRefi.com and AbodeDefense.com which were actually consent farms that used dark patterns to induce consumers to provide their personal information and obscured disclosures about how that information would be used.
- The company sold millions of leads between 2019 and 2022, according to the FTC, averaging the sale of 10,000 leads per day.
- When submitting information seeking a quote for a mortgage, consumers were required to provide their personal information, but, in many cases, they never received a quote at all.
- The sites had an “Our Partners” page which listed more than 300 marketing partners in small print. Users would have to zoom in and scroll from left to right to view all the partners.
- The defendants also sold leads they misrepresented as coming from their websites, when in fact they were obtained through other sources. The defendants falsified metadata to make it look like the leads came from their websites.
The Settlement: The defendants are banned from initiating or assisting others in initiating any outbound call that plays or delivers a prerecorded message. They are also banned from initiating or assisting in the initiation of any call to a person whose number is on the Do Not Call Registry.
- They are also banned from collecting any covered information from consumers and selling or transferring it.