For more than a year, judges across the country have been attacking the issue of standing and whether plaintiffs suing collectors for violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act have suffered a concrete injury. In many of those cases, judges have indicated that a concrete injury is more than just anxiety or emotional distress; there needs to be a financial component. A District Court judge in Hawaii has determined that the price of paying for postage to mail a dispute letter is enough of a concrete injury for a plaintiff to have standing to sue, and has denied a defendant’s motion to dismiss as well as a motion to decertify a class action.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Viernes v. DNF Associates can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff sent two dispute letters to the defendant, spending $13.70 on postage, in response to a collection lawsuit that was filed against him by the defendant. He sued the defendant, alleging it violated the FDCPA and Hawaii state law because it was not licensed to collect in Hawaii. The complaint sought to include anyone else in Hawaii who was sued by the defendant for an unpaid debt.
The defendant filed a motion to dismiss, arguing the plaintiff and class members lacked standing to sue and that a procedural error cannot serve as a basis to establish standing.
After a lengthy analysis of whether the plaintiff has standing to sue, looking at the lawsuit that was filed against him as well as other factors, Judge J. Michael Seabright of the District Court for the District of Hawaii turned to the postage that the plaintiff paid to mail his dispute letters after the defendant filed its collection lawsuit.
“The court agrees that having to pay $13.70 in postage fees is a concrete harm,” Judge Seabright wrote. “Monetary harm is an obvious example of a concrete harm. And the ‘loss of even a small amount of money,’ i.e., $13.70, ‘is ordinarily an ‘injury’ ‘ for purposes of Article III.”
The defendant argued that the postage paid by the plaintiff is not related to its failure to obtain a license in Hawaii, and therefore should not be taken into consideration as part of the plaintiff’s standing argument.
“In short, there is a line of causation between DNF’s unlawful collection lawsuit and Viernes’s incurring postage costs,” the judge wrote. “That line is not too attenuated, is not interrupted by a superseding cause, and represents a causal connection sufficient for standing, despite the possibility that the injury might have occurred under a different set of hypothetical facts. Viernes’s incurring postage costs is, therefore, fairly traceable to DNF’s unlawful collection lawsuit.”
