WASHINGTON–The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken action against two co-founders of a company that resold loan applications containing sensitive personal data to lenders and data brokers without assessing the sources of those leads or the purchasers they sold to.
In complaints filed in federal court, the CFPB alleged that Dmitry Fomichev and Davit Gasparyan (also known as David Gasparyan) co-founded and operated T3Leads, a lead aggregator that bought and sold payday and installment loan applications without properly vetting buyers and sellers. The CFPB filed a separate lawsuit against T3Leads and two other individuals in December 2015.
“T3Leads steered consumers toward bad deals with lenders it didn’t vet and with no regard for how the consumers’ information would be used,” said CFPB Director Richard Cordray in a statement. “This is a reminder to the middlemen who buy and sell consumer loan applications: if you engage in this type of conduct, you risk the consequences for harming people.”
T3Leads is based in Burbank, Calif., and is owned by Grigor and Marina Demirchyan. Lead aggregators buy consumer information – called leads – from lead generators, websites that market payday and installment loans. Leads contain personal information such as consumers’ names, telephone numbers, home and email addresses, references, and employer information, the CFPB said.