Mickey Lee from Maurice Wutscher has written about a case in which a judge from the Northern District of Indiana has certified a class action against a collection agency that was alleged to have violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by saying in a letter that it “may” report a debt to the credit bureaus and that payment of an offered settlement account would stop collection activity, when in fact the debt had already been reported.
A copy of the order in the case of Erin Johnson v. Enhanced Recovery Company can be accessed by clicking here.
In granting the certification, Judge Philip Simon asserted that the act of receiving a collection letter in the mail where a misleading or false claim may have been made is enough to meet the “injury in fact” requirements under Article III and allow the case to move forward.
Though intangible, the injury is both concrete, because it presents an appreciable risk of harm to the plaintiff, and particularized, because the challenged letter was sent directly to the plaintiff.
The defendant attempted to claim that whether “any statements resulted in a material misstatement that actually affected the recipient’s decision-making is an issue that cannot be proved on a classwide basis.” But Judge Simon ruled that the “question will be not whether any particular plaintiff’s decision-making was influenced by the challenged text of the notice, but whether ‘a significant fraction of the population would be.’ ”
There are nearly 40,000 members of the potential class, according to the plaintiffs.
UPDATE:
