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.
I don’t want to give the whole plot of this case away in the first sentence, so I hope you continue reading, but a collector is facing a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act lawsuit because it continued to try and collect a debt after the plaintiff sent an email to the defendant inquiring why the defendant was attempting to collect a debt that was not hers — an inquiry that the defendant responded to — with the complaint saying the defendant “had all the information it needed to determine the debt did not belong” to the plaintiff. I will also warn you in advance that this is a lawsuit involving text messages and emails sent to the plaintiff by the defendant, but the nature of those communications is not the reason why this case was filed.
A copy of the complaint, filed in the District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, can be accessed using case number 23-cv-00147 or by clicking here.
The defendant sent seven emails to the plaintiff over the course of 16 days seeking to collect on the debt. Five days after the seventh email was sent, the plaintiff sent an email to the defendant, inquiring why the defendant was “attempting to collect this debt which was not hers,” according to the complaint. The same day, the defendant responses with a “form” response that provided the same account information and balance that had been in all the previous emails.
A week later, the defendant resumed its communications, sending three emails and three text messages over the next 50 days attempting to collect on the debt.
The plaintiff filed suit, alleging the defendant violated Section 1692f(1) of the FDCPA by attempting to collect on a debt that it knew or had reason to know was illegitimate, according to the complaint. As a result of the action — and inaction — by the defendant, the plaintiff has suffered from stress, anxiety, worry, fear, frustration, sleeplessness, nervousness, embarrassment, and humiliation, while also living in fear that the collection notices will harm her credit reputation, according to the complaint.
