NEW YORK (BLOOMBERG) — New York City is hiring dozens of sophisticated sleuths to sift companies’ own data for evidence that they might be ripping off consumers.
Sam Levine, commissioner of the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, is building a 36-person bureau of data scientists, technologists and economists who will extract and analyze what he describes as “billions of records” to help New York City build cases against predatory corporations and practices.
The new unit is the latest sign of the aggressive posture the agency, which has oversight of business licensing and regulation, consumer protection enforcement and labor standards, has adopted under Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration. Levine, a 40-year-old former Federal Trade Commission attorney, is seeking to position himself as a muscular regulator after the Trump administration gutted the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and retreated from the aggressive antitrust policies pursued by Levine’s former boss, Biden administration FTC Commissioner Lina Khan…