Determining that a plaintiff’s recollection of how many calls he purported to receive and how many times he told a debt collector to stop calling because it had the wrong number was “blatantly contradicted” by his own phone records and those of the collection agency, a District Court judge in Michigan has granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Boozer v. Enhanced Recovery Company can be accessed by clicking here.
The defendant was attempting to contact an individual in regards to an unpaid cell phone debt. The defendant hired a vendor to find contact information for the debtor in question and the vendor provided a cell phone number, which belonged to the plaintiff and not the debtor. The defendant contacted the number, attempting to reach the debtor. This is where the case reaches a fork in the road.
During his deposition, the plaintiff claims to have received as many as 20 calls from the defendant and that he spoke to a representative “several” times, informing the defendant it had the wrong number. He sued, alleging the defendant violated several sections of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by engaging in false or deceptive means to collect a debt, by engaging in harassing or abusive conduct, and by using unfair or unconscionable means to collect on a debt.
But the plaintiff’s phone records and the call logs of the defendant tell a different story.
Reconciling the two documents, the judge found them “difficult to square” with the plaintiff’s testimony. It appeared, from the defendant’s call logs, that the plaintiff only spoke to a representative from the defendant once, that the representative indicated it was a wrong number, and that the defendant never called back again after the one conversation.
“Here, the contradiction between Mr. Boozer’s deposition testimony and the phone records that he himself offered into evidence shows that his testimony is merely colorable and therefore insufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact,” wrote Judge Paul Borman of the District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, Southern Division. “Therefore, the Court does not adopt Mr. Boozer’s account of the facts because it is blatantly contradicted by the rest of the record.”
Judge Borman subsequently shot down each of the allegations made by the plaintiff in regards to the different sections of the FDCPA that the defendant was alleged to have violated.
