Shanna Tallarico, formerly the Director of NYLAG’s Consumer Protection Project, spoke with New York Focus reporters Julia Rock and Sam Mellins about predatory loan collectors and improper service of legal papers to consumers, also known as “sewer service.”
“It didn’t get better,” said Shanna Tallarico, formerly the project director of the consumer protection unit at the nonprofit New York Legal Assistance Group. “The lies just changed.”
The group brought a class action lawsuit in 2020 against two process servers, the agency that employed them, and the law firm that used them after Tallarico found suspicious patterns in their claims of service.
Tallarico found instances where each server claimed to have served dozens of people at more than 40 different apartments in fewer than three hours. Out of hundreds of attempts at service, they claimed to have served a defendant’s relative 94 percent of the time — a highly implausible rate, the lawsuit said. The servers visited the correct locations to maintain their GPS records, according to the lawsuit, but failed to actually serve anyone. The case eventually reached a $1.35 million settlement in 2023 that barred the servers from future work in the industry and barred the agency that hired them from working with servers who have previously been disciplined for fraudulent service.
Read the full story in New York Focus, originally published on June 10, 2025. To learn more about NYLAG’s work to end false “sewer” service practices, read our report on deceptive delivery HERE.
