DENVER- Colorado Attorney General John Suthers announced today the Consumer Credit Unit of his office filed a civil lawsuit against United Credit Recovery (UCR), its principal and director, Leonard Potillo (D.O.B. 06/26/65), as well as against GTF Services and Standley & Associates, alleging that they sought to pass off fraudulent bank documents in their attempt to collect on outstanding debts and engaged in deceptive trade practices that harmed consumers.
“UCR faked bank officer signatures on documents to orchestrate a debt-for-sale scheme from which they handsomely profited,” explained Suthers. “The scheme involved thousands of individual accounts totaling tens of millions of dollars,” Suthers continued.
According to the complaint, UCR purchased consumer debt from Wells Fargo and US Bank and then used account information provided by the banks to create hundreds of thousands of fake affidavits purporting to describe and to verify debt owed by consumers. UCR profited by using the fake affidavits in collecting on the debt and in reselling debt to third-party debt collectors.
In addition to using the affidavits for its’ own collection purposes, UCR sold accounts of Colorado consumers to other agencies and distributed the falsely-created affidavits to those agencies. GTF, one such agency, is alleged to have used the affidavits through the debt-collection law firm Standley & Associates, who filed the affidavits in more than 300 debt collection lawsuits against consumers in Colorado.
The fabricated affidavits have assisted in the collection of money from Colorado consumers by being filed in court as evidence of the amount owed and by being presented as validation of the debt directly to Colorado consumers.
The complaint was filed pursuant to the Colorado Consumer Protection Act and the Colorado Fair Debt Collection Practices Act with the Denver County District Court.
Colorado’s complaint asks the courts to completely compensate or restore to their original position, all consumer injured by the defendants.
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