EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is part of a series that is sponsored by WebRecon. WebRecon identifies serial plaintiffs lurking in your database BEFORE you contact them and expose yourself to a likely lawsuit. Protect your company from as many as one in three new consumer lawsuits by scrubbing your consumers through WebRecon first. Want to learn more? Call (855) WEB-RECON or email admin@webrecon.net today! Thanks to WebRecon for sponsoring this series.
DISCLAIMER: This article is based on a complaint. The defendant has not responded to the complaint to present its side of the case. The claims mentioned are accusations and should be considered as such until and unless proven otherwise.
A defendant has removed a class-action lawsuit filed against it to federal court in Illinois, after it was sued for allegedly violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by not making the opt-out disclosure in an email “clear and conspicuous” enough.
- This is another in a strong of lawsuits that have been filed in recent months following the enactment of Regulation F that accuse collectors of violating the provisions of the rule that require opt-out disclosures in emails be clear and conspicuous. A judge has yet to rule on any of these cases to set a threshold for what clear and conspicuous actually means.
- A copy of the complaint, now in District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, can be accessed using case number 22-cv-04719.
Backstory: In this case, the plaintiff read the full contents of the email, according to the complaint, but objected to the location of the opt-out disclosure, which was at the bottom of the email, included in a number of other disclosures, such as the mini-Miranda, as well as the fact that he was required to click on a link to unsubscribe himself. The complaint accuses the collector of not providing “instructions for how to inform the debt collector via email that the consumer wishes to opt out of future communications (i.e. by replying to the email or sending an opt out to another address).
- Without providing any idea what he thinks clear and conspicuous means, the plaintiff says that the location and format of the opt-out notice was neither.
Class Allegations:
