Teaming Up for Consumers
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau partnered with other federal and state officials to increase consumer protections. It worked with the Department of Defense and the Judge Advocate General’s Corps to investigate and stop predatory lenders from targeting servicemembers. It worked with the Department of Education and state attorneys general to halt fraudulent practices at for-profit colleges and cancel hundreds of millions of dollars in debts where students were defrauded. It worked with the Education and Treasury Departments to rein in student loan servicers using sloppy and abusive practices. This chapter describes those efforts, as well as other partnerships—with the Federal Communications Commission to crack down on companies cramming bogus charges on mobile phone bills and to simplify mobile phone and internet bills, with banks to make credit scores available to customers for free, and with financial technology companies seeking to extend credit and financial services to people who lack access to them.