Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller has joined six other states and the Federal Trade Commission in a federal lawsuit against a company with offices and Florida and Pennsylvania for allegedly illegally taking millions of dollars from people in telemarketing, direct mail and Internet schemes. Attorney General spokesman, Bob Brammer, says the suit is against "Your Money Access" company, or Y-M-A .
Brammer says Y-M-A contracts with others to withdraw money from people’s bank accounts, and in this case they linked with people running schemes to illegally take money from the victim’s bank. Brammer says the company was the conduit to funnel money to the people running the illegal schemes.
He says Y-M-A debited more than 200-million dollars over a two or three-year period for the "con schemes" and facilitated the fraudulent schemes. Brammer says some of the people discovered the money was being taken without their permission.
Brammer says those customers protested and didn’t lose their money, but he says many more didn’t notice the scams, and lost millions and millions of dollars. Brammer says most lawsuits go directly after the people conducting the illegal scams, but this one tried to cut off one of the key components needed to get the money.
Brammer says they’re asking the court to prohibit the violations and for "serious financial consequences" to require the company to give up the money it wrongfully took. Iowa’s Attorney General has joined his counterparts in Illinois, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, and Vermont to file the complaint U-S District Court in the eastern district of Pennsylvania.