A District Court judge in Arizona has granted a defendant’s motion to dismiss a class action complaint after it was sued for allegedly violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act for using language in a collection letter that made it seem as though both the defendant and the original creditor were going to report the unpaid debt to credit reporting agencies.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Carter v. IC Systems can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff received a collection letter from the defendant that included the following passage:
Your delinquent account has been turned over to this collection agency. Sprint is both the original and current creditor to whom this debt is owed.
The account information is scheduled to be reported to the national credit reporting agencies in your creditor’s name. You have the right to inspect your credit file in accordance with federal law. I.C. System will not submit the account information to the national credit reporting agencies until the expiration of the time described in the notice below.
The plaintiff filed suit, alleging that the language violated Section 1692e of the FDCPA for make a false, deceptive, or misleading representation in connection with the collection of a debt. The language was misleading, the plaintiff alleged, because it could be interpreted to read that both the original creditor and the debt collector would report the debt to the credit bureaus, if you look at the sentence that says the debt would be reported “in your creditor’s name” alongside the sentence that says “I.C. System will not submit the account information to the national credit reporting agencies …”
But Judge John Tuchi of the District Court for the District of Arizona agreed with the defendant’s argument that the plaintiff’s interpretation of the letter “falls below an accepted level of reasonableness.” Doing something in the name of someone “implicitly” means that the action is being done by someone else, Judge Tuchi noted, adding that the plaintiff’s “convoluted stretch of the language is beyond what the least sophisticated consumer could reasonably be expected to understand from the letter.”
