Dean Graybill, Vice President

Dean Graybill is a Vice President for Litigation with AARP Foundation focusing on employment, income, and consumer issues. Formerly Dean served as a consumer protection attorney at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for over three decades in a wide variety of management and litigation positions. Appointed to the Senior Executive Service, he served in the 1990s as the head manager of both the Enforcement Division and the Service Industry Practices Division (DSIP). In three years, DSIP brought over forty federal court cases halting economic and health care frauds, many targeting older Americans (e.g., “Project Senior Sentinel”). In two enforcement “sweeps” alone, the Division halted prize promotion and investment frauds costing consumers over $250 million.

Later, as deputy manager of the FTC’s San Francisco office, Dean supervised litigation teams attacking a wide range of predatory practices spawned by the 2009 financial crisis. This included cases combatting bogus “foreclosure rescue” offers, deceptive payday loans, and debt collection abuses targeting financially strapped consumers, many of them seniors. In one such case, the team won a victory at trial against a work-at-home internet scheme victimizing over 250,000 consumers. FTC v. Commerce Planet, Inc., 878 F. Supp. 2d, 1048 (C.D. Cal. 2012), aff’d in part, 815 F.3d 593 (9th Cir. 2016).

Throughout his career, most recently in the FTC’s Advertising Practices Division, Dean has investigated or litigated numerous other issues affecting older Americans, including the false advertising of health products, weight loss programs, and medical devices; and anticompetitive restraints on the low-cost provision of health care.