A District Court judge in Arizona has partially granted a defendant’s motion for summary judgment in a Fair Credit Reporting Act and Fair Debt Collection Practices Act case, while also denying the plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment, in a he-said, she-said case over whether the plaintiff made payments in accordance with a settlement agreement with the defendant. The ruling does take into account a new ruling from the Ninth Circuit regarding the FDCPA’s statute of limitations that furnishers may want to pay attention to.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Makridis v. Experian Information Solutions et al. can be accessed by clicking here.
The background on this case is almost as long as the analysis and ruling from Judge Dominic W. Lanza of the District Court for the District of Arizona, so there are some details that are going to be left out. Suffice to say, the plaintiff received a letter from one of the defendants offering to settle a debt of $5,970 for $3,980. The plaintiff just had to make two payments of $1,990 each one month apart in 2016. The plaintiff claims he made the payments, the defendants say they payments were never received. Starting in 2018, the defendant began reporting the unpaid debt on the plaintiff’s credit report. The plaintiff began disputing the debt and his attorney sent the credit reporting agencies copies of the cleared checks. The defendant counters that what the attorney sent was a picture of an undeposited cashier’s check, an unsigned USPS certified mail receipt, and several pixelated copies of bank documents.
In 2022, the plaintiff filed suit, accusing the defendants of not properly investigating his dispute and falsely reporting the amount of the debt to the credit reporting agencies.
The defendant argued that the plaintiff did not produce any evidence to dispute whether a reasonable investigation was conducted or not, even failing to ask a representative of the defendant questions about the investigation when the representative was being deposed. Ultimately, Judge Lanza noted, the plaintiff’s argument that the defendant’s investigation was unreasonable centered on the fact that it was not resolved in the plaintiff’s favor. “Here, given the utter absence of any evidence concerning the scope and nature of Defendant’s investigation (beyond the bare fact that Defendant received a packet of materials from Plaintiff that were, on their face, inconclusive as to the validity of the debt), a reasonable factfinder could not conclude that the investigation was objectively unreasonable,” Judge Lanza wrote.
On the FDCPA claim, though, the ruling was less favorable for the defendant. The defendant attempted to argue that the FDCPA’s one year statute of limitations warranted a ruling in its favor, but looking at the recent ruling in Brown v. Transworld, Judge Lanza determined that every time the amount owed was misreported to the credit reporting agencies restarted the statute of limitations clock.
Ultimately, Judge Lanza ruled, there is no clear-cut evidence whether the plaintiff settled the debt or not, and denied the defendant’s summary judgment motion on those counts.
