The agency also will oversee debt settlement firms, debt collectors and check-cashing stores.
Debt settlement firms typically offer to negotiate with creditors in exchange for a fee.
In practice, however, the debt settlement firms frequently manage to please no one.
Another factor undermining the card companies is the rise of debt settlement firms.
A week later, the C.F.P.B. filed a lawsuit against a debt-settlement firm, Freedom Debt Relief, which markets its services as a way for highly indebted people to discharge their financial obligations.
Debt settlement has swollen to some 2,000 firms, from a niche of perhaps a dozen companies a decade ago, according to trade associations and the Federal Trade Commission, which is completing new rules aimed at curbing abuses within the industry.
The threat of regulations makes securing new customers imperative now, before new rules can take effect, said Matthew G. Hearn, whose firm, Mstars of Minneapolis, trains debt settlement sales staffs.
But you can often do that yourself at no cost, she said, and in most cases, it makes sense to use the money you would pay to the settlement firm to pay down your debt directly.
Noting "the legal firestorm that has subsumed the debt settlement industry" in recent years, Jeffrey Tenenbaum, a lawyer representing dozens of settlement firms, warned that many companies could be "legislated, regulated or litigated out of business".
