STOP LOAN-SHARKING OUR SOLDIERS

GREAT NEWS!!! Finally help for our soldiers and their families.

Elizabeth Warren, the Obama’s head of the new consumer financial protection agency, plans to name Holly Petraeus, the wife of General David Petraeus--the top American general in Afghanistan--, to a new position to protect military families from predatory lenders.
Holly Petraeus, a longtime advocate for military families, to crack down on unscrupulous lending operations that have thrived by focusing on vulnerable Americans-- especially military personnel and their families. Republicans in Congress, say the new agency is an enemy of free enterprise.

The lending operations that have proliferated outside military bases can charge 25 to 50 percent of the military paycheck for “banking fees,‘ “payday loans,” etc.. Many soldiers are young and poor, so they need access to the money quickly. Congress adopted rules setting a 36 percent cap on so-called payday loans made to active-duty military and their families, but the businesses just use other terminology to get the money.
"You see that strip outside installations--the pawn shops, the tattoo parlors, the shady auto dealers," Holly recently told an interviewer. "I once heard those businesses described as bears lined up at a trout stream."

Nearly three-fourths of financial counselors and attorneys said they have sometime in the last six months counseled members of the armed forces who had fallen victim to abusive or discriminatory auto lending.

In addition to active military personnel, veterans represent a potentially lucrative target for a wide range of scam artists, from online or over-the-phone identity theft rings to bogus charities set up to purportedly help service members.
Many veterans have steady access to benefits through the Department of Veterans Affairs and other government agencies that can be particularly attractive to con operations and prostitution schemers..
Two years ago, the VA warned veterans of a telephone scam in which callers posed as VA employees and asked for credit card information over the phone, supposedly to update prescription information.

The Better Business Bureau last month warned of bogus e-mails seeking personal information that was sent out by someone who claimed to be an attorney with the VA. In addition, government computers, containing extensive military personnel identification and family information has been hacked and stolen numerous times over the past years.

From Huffington Post