New York mayor Zohran Mamdani’s top consumer watchdog has one gripe about New Yorkers – he would like them to complain more. “We get about 30,000 complaints a year,” said Samuel AA Levine, New York City’s new commissioner of consumer and worker protection. “I’d really like to get the number up.”
From downtown Manhattan, he has renewed a war on junk fees and deceptive subscriptions that he started in Washington DC as the Federal Trade Commission’s consumer protection director during the Biden presidency, banned hotels’ hidden charges, and cracked down on delivery companies’ “design tricks” that lower wages and predatory debt collection. Since January, his office has sued self-storage companies and won millions from Uber Eats and Amazon.
