CAMCO Saga Ends with $1 million FTC Settlement

The long and complicated battle over the debt collection practices employed by Capital Acquisitions and Management Corp. (CAMCO) appears to have come to a close on Tuesday.

The Federal Trade Commission announced that they had reached a settlement with the former debt purchaser/collector — and their affiliated companies — where the company would pay $1 million and agree to a permanent ban on any future debt collection activities.

The FTC said in a statement that the $1 million would come from what it considers ill-gotten gains due to debt collection practices that violate federal law. The settlement also explicitly bans the defendants from engaging in debt-collection activities or assisting others engaged in debt-collection activities. The defendants named in the suit were CAMCO; RM Financial Services, Inc.; Capital Properties Holding, Inc.; Caribbean Asset Management, Ltd., Reese Waugh, Jerome Kuebler, Eric Woldoff, George Othon, Jeffrey Garrington, David Kapp, Joshua Rausch, Michael Seng, and Billy Martin.

The FTC also said that the settlement officially ends the litigation against the defendants and CAMCO, although it does mention that one individual is still considered a defendant.

The legal battle between the FTC and CAMCO has been ongoing since March of 2004. In that month, the FTC reached a $300,000 settlement with CAMCO over various and wide-ranging illegal debt collection practices. At the time, the company agreed to alter their policies and abide by the FDCPA.

But in subsequent months, the FTC said it received some 2,000 complaints against the company for debt collection practices and it launched another investigation in December of the same year. Shortly after the investigation began, the FTC froze the company’s assets, closed its doors, and ultimately auctioned off its debt assets in January of 2005.

The FTC’s case had continued since then, focusing on restitution to be paid from the company’s assets and individual defendants’ personal assets.

After the asset auction, the mainstream media began to pick up on the story and use it as an example in, if not the basis for, countless “Zombie Debt”-type articles, still running to this day.