In the Media
Asbury Auto Challenges FTC’s ‘Payment Packing’ Complaint
Read Time: 1 minMember Jason Bichsel (Cleveland) was interviewed by Auto Finance News on September 12, 2024, in “Challenges FTC’s ‘Payment Packing’ Complaint.” Jason discusses deceptive aftermarket product sales.
Asbury is pushing back publicly against the FTC’s complaints as the group’s leadership believes it has a robust legal compliance department and that the allegations are false, Jason Bichsel, an attorney in the Cleveland office of law firm McGlinchey whose practice focuses on financial services compliance, told AFN.
Asbury also has said that it tried “for months” to get the FTC to provide specific evidence to support its allegations, according to the auto group’s website. Instead, the FTC decided to file the enforcement action without giving the auto group a chance to review the facts of the allegations, Bichsel said.
If the evidence was provided more clearly, Asbury could have informally resolved the potential dispute before it reached a public enforcement action, Bichsel said. For example, in the FTC’s complaint against Asbury, “as many as 75 percent of consumers reported that they were charged for add-on products and services they did not authorize or were falsely told were required,” according to an FTC survey cited in the complaint.
The complaint also provides a breakdown of how much more Black and Latino consumers paid for the same add-on products as a non-Latino white consumer but does not provide clarity on how the FTC obtained the data or how many people were included in the survey or when they were contacted, Bichsel said.