After she quickly signed onto the mortgage deal, I had pretty much written off California AG Kamala Harris as doing anything useful in consumer protection.

I may have been premature in my judgement:

California Attorney General Kamala Harris is on a roll. There’s been a fair bit of media coverage about abusive debt collection practices, particularly in credit cards, but at least until Harris filed a suit on Thursday against bank miscreant JP Morgan (hat tip Deontos), surprisingly little action.

Because the amounts are usually much smaller than in mortgages, banks have incentives to play fast and loose if they think they can wring some extra blood out of the turnip of an overextended consumer. But the result often goes well beyond just improperly submitting information to the court. JP Morgan and other banks have been accused of trying to collect on debt where they have the amounts wrong, where the debt was discharged in bankruptcy, or where the consumer was never notified an action was underway. And when the debt is sold to debt collectors, the same problems with inaccuracy of information, invalidity of the debt, and abuse of the legal system multiply.

………



Harris mentions over 100,000 dubious lawsuits filed between January 2008 and April 2011 and contends that the illegal conduct extends from “pre-lawsuit correspondence” to the validation and papering up of debt sold to third parties.

The interesting bit is how the suit is framed. The defendants are the JP Morgan holding company plus two business units, as well as an unnamed “DOES 1 through 100, inclusive” where the AG intends to obtain their names and capacities. This raises the specter that she intends not only to sue other firms (such as the law firms that were Chase’s arms and legs) but individuals at Chase and its agents. And this is where it gets fun (click to enlarge):



Each defendant for each violation. We have 100,000+ violations at Chase, with at least three entities involved, each a separate defendant. And if she can get the individuals who were supervising the robosigning operations (better yet, the C level execs ultimately responsible) and the complicit law firms, she might bankrupt some well placed people. This could be extremely entertaining.

Well, it could be entertaining for a few months, but I’m not getting my hopes up.

Still, this is more than I expected from Harris when she rushed to sign onto the mortgage sellout.