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The Federal Trade Commission charged a data broker operation with illegally selling payday loan applicants' information to scammers, who then took millions from their bank accounts and charged their credit cards without consent.

In a complaint filed Tuesday, the FTC said the data broker enterprise bought payday loan applications from operators of payday loan websites, or obtained them on their own, and then sold the information to scammers who made millions in unauthorized charges.

The FTC named Ideal Financial Solutions Inc. as one of the scammers that purchased the account information of more than 500,000 consumers and raided their accounts for at least $7.1 million.

The defendants are Sequoia One LLC, Gen X Marketing Group LLC, Jason A. Kotzker, Theresa D. Bartholomew, John E. Bartholomew Jr. and Paul T. McDonnell.

According to the FTC, the defendants often sold payday loan applications to Ideal Financial for about 50 cents each, while legitimate lenders pay up to $100 or more. The complaint alleges they did this knowing that Ideal Financial was making unauthorized bank account debits and credit card charges.

According to the complaint, the defendants helped hide Ideal Financial's fraud by using fine-print disclosures on their websites as well as other misleading tactics to avoid alerting banks to the fraudulent activity.