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.
Debt collectors are prohibited from communicating with consumers before 8:00am and after 9:00pm local time, as just about everyone knows. But when it comes to something like email, what time matters? The time the email was sent? Or the time it was received? Or the time it was opened by the consumer? Regulation F says that what matters is the time the email was sent, not when it was received or viewed. I don’t know a lot about email, so when Gmail tells me this:
does that mean it was sent at that time or it was received at that time? A collector is facing a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act lawsuit for allegedly disregarding two letters from a consumer informing the collector what times were convenient for the plaintiff to be contacted and sending four emails during the time when the plaintiff said it was inconvenient to be communicated with.
A copy of the lawsuit, filed in the District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, can be accessed using case number 23-cv-01411 or by clicking here.
According to the complaint, the plaintiff sent two letters to the defendant — two days apart from one another — with the following message:
“I realize that you are attempting to get in touch with me. Please keep in mind that it is inconvenient for you to contact me in any way whatsoever (this includes emails and phone calls) from 8am to 6pm because of my work schedule. You may attempt to contact me regarding this delinquent account after this time.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Am I the only one who thinks it was weird to send two letters two days apart with the exact same message? I mean who wants to make two separate trips to the post office?
Two weeks after the second letter was sent, and over a course of three weeks, the defendant allegedly send four emails, all of them between 8am and 6pm. The complaint says that the defendant contacted the plaintiff via email at those times. Does that mean that’s when the emails were sent? Or that’s when the plaintiff received them? Or that’s when the plaintiff noticed them?
The complaint accuses the defendant of violating Sections 1692c and 1692d of the FDCPA.
