Daily Digest – January 7. City Wipes Out $11 Million in Unpaid Debt; Navient Facing TCPA Class-Action Suit

WIPE-OUT

• The city of Jacksonville, Fla., is getting ready to write off $11 million in unpaid parking tickets, even though the company apparently is working with a collection agency – Penn Credit Corp. – on collecting the debts. Some of those debts date back 30 years, and the city is looking at possibly sending out another RFP for working with a debt collection agency.

HEY, YOU LOOK LIKE YOU MIGHT HAVE SOME MONEY

• It appears as though Navient is having so much trouble collecting from actual customers that the student loan servicer is now trying to collect from people who never had student loans in the first place. A Tennessee man has filed a class-action in the Western District of Tennessee against the company alleging that Navient called him on his cell phone using an autodialer even though the man never had a student loan and had never given out his cell phone number to the company.

YOU REALLY KNOW HOW TO TURN ME ON

• Nearly 12,000 laptops used by the Department of the Interior are inadequately protected and can be easily hacked, according to an internal report. The laptops are set to authenticate users after the machines boot up, when they should be set to do so before the machines are booted up. There is no explanation for how the configurations were switched.

WORTH NOTING:  Macy’s is closing 36 stores and laying off 4,500 employees … The CEO of United Airlines received a heart transplant … The Powerball jackpot has hit $675 million … The decision to raise interest rates last month was a “close call” … Fitbit is being sued because its heart-rate monitors are “wildly inaccurate” … Apple is abandoning the headphone jack on the next iPhone … The story of a man with nearly 1,500 credit cards … BMW is showing off a car with no mirrors … How to prime your brain for success.

De-fog your windows twice as fast

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