Brokerage companies for moving services in Florida have been issued a life-time ban from operating in the state in additional to getting heavy financial penalties for a scheme they were tied to.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced this month that Gold Standard Moving Storage and others have been ordered by courts after investigations by the Florida Consumer Protection Division. The brokerage was ordered to pay $4 million to settle litigation. Uthmeier’s office said that  Charles Abrams, Rudolph Rice and Daniel Metz were operating the moving brokerage companies that presented themselves as moving carriers and subjected Florida residents to unnecessary payments.

Consumer complaints filed with the state caused the Consumer Protection Division to launch investigations into claims by customers that the companies provided low quotes for jobs and then demanded additional payments. Many customers also complained the companies promised refunds but never owned up to those promises.

“We will not tolerate shady moving operators scamming hardworking Floridians,” said Uthmeier in a news release. “Thanks to the work of Senior Assistant Attorney General Josie Warren, Deputy Director Sasha Funk Granai, and Assistant Attorney General Pooneh Charkhian-Martinez of the Consumer Protection Division, these operators and entities are permanently banned from the moving business in Florida and will be paying millions of dollars in monetary judgments.”

The bogus moving brokerages operated under company titles such as Gold Standard, Executive Van Lines, Imperial Moving Group, Simple Path Moving, National American Van Lines, Razor Van Lines, Spartan Moving and Storage, United American Moving and Us Pro Moving and Logistics. Investigators say the companies continued the scam by routinely changing the names of the businesses to dodge any links to bad reviews online or otherwise.

The sum of $4.139 million was ordered to be repaid to the customers of Gold Standard. Out of that sum, $1.12 million will go to consumer relief. State officials say they’ll continue to try and contact customers to see that they get the financial relief the courts ordered.

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Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer says he won’t resign his post, despite pressure from some in his party after he voted to move forward with a Republican spending bill that avoided a government shutdown.

“Look, I’m not stepping down,” Schumer said in an interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday. The New York senator said he knew voting for the bill backed by Republican President Donald Trump would spark “a lot of controversy.”

“I did it out of pure conviction as to what a leader should do and what the right thing for America and my party was,” he said. “People disagree.”

Democrats last week were confronted with two painful options: allowing passage of a bill they believe gave Trump vast discretion on spending decisions or letting funding lapse. After Schumer said he’d vote to advance the spending measure, 10 Democrats supported breaking the party’s filibuster and allowing the bill to pass.

Schumer’s move has sparked outrage from some Democrats and progressive activists who protested at his office and called on him to resign his position. They said they’d like to see him face a primary challenge — perhaps from New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The uproar prompted Schumer last week to postpone his book tour amid a series of planned progressive demonstrations.

Schumer told NBC that the spending bill that funds the government through September was “certainly bad.” But he argued that not voting to provide the funding would have been “15 or 20 times worse.” He called his action “a vote of principle,” arguing that “sometimes when you’re a leader, you have to do things to avoid a real danger that might come down the curve.”

“I don’t want to talk about inside-the-beltway stuff,” Sanders said.

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