TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (Legal Newsline) – Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, along with the Federal Trade Commission, announced a lawsuit against CardReady LLC over allegedly laundering credit card transactions.
CardReady is a payment processing sales organization. The company, along with its three executives and three telemarketing company owners, allegedly laundered these transactions as part of a national telemarketing scam based in Pinellas County.
Bondi and the FTC claim that CardReady facilitated $20 million in illegal upfront fees that a telemarketing scam collected from consumers through fraudulent actions. Consumers were allegedly promised lower interest rates.
CardReady created fake businesses to act as a front and to launder the illegal fees, according to claims made by the state and the FTC. These alleged actions are claimed to have led to financial suffering among consumers. Claims state that the company’s alleged laundering scheme helped the scammers evade detection from both law enforcement agencies and payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard.
The other defendants in the case, along with the CardReady entity, include its executives Brand A. Becker, James F. Berland and Andrew S. Padnick and three additional owners of original defendant One Easy Solution LLC, Jason E. Gagnon, Kenneth A. Sallies and Matthew B. Thomas.