A District Court judge in Indiana has denied a motion for summary judgment filed by a defendant in a class action lawsuit alleging a collection letter sent to the plaintiff violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by not clearly indicating the identity of the original creditor.
A copy of the ruling in Taylor v. Alltran Financial can be accessed by clicking here.
The top of the letter includes some housekeeping information about the debt, including the name of the “Original Creditor” Springleaf Financial Services and the name of the “Current Creditor” LVNV Funding. Had that been all the information that was mentioned about the account, Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson wrote, the defendants might have had grounds for obtaining summary judgment. But the first line of the letter — Alltran Financial, LP has been contracted to lead and represent in the collection of the judgment awarded on your Springleaf Financial Services Inc. account. — is where the problems begin. The letter does not indicate whom Alltran has been contracted by, but does mention Springleaf Financial at the end of the sentence.
“Of course,” Judge Magnus-Stinson wrote, “based upon the facts of this lawsuit it is now clear that LVNV acquired the debt at some point from Springleaf, but for all intents and purposes the letter makes it sound like Springleaf is the one who contracted Alltran and that Mr. Taylor still has a ‘Springleaf Financial Services Inc. account’ on which Alltran is attempting to collect.”
As such, the judge ruled, the plaintiff has “plausibly alleged” that the defendants violated Section 1692g(a)(2), which requires a debt collector to send the consumer a written notice containing, among other things, the name of the creditor to whom the debt is owed, and denied the defendant’s motion for summary judgment.
