A Magistrate Judge in Ohio has gone to great lengths to recommend that a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act lawsuit filed against a creditor and the law firm it used to collect on an unpaid debt be dismissed on the grounds that the plaintiff’s complaint fails to state a claim against any of the defendants “no matter how liberally” the claims are considered.
A copy of the ruling in the case of Barnes v. Capital One Financial Corp. et al. can be accessed by clicking here.
The plaintiff disputed a debt with the creditor back in 2021 and while the creditor marked the account in cease and desist status, it allegedly did not validate the debt. Instead, it allegedly closed the account and charged off the debt and then placed the account with a collection law firm. In March of 2022, the law firm filed a collection lawsuit against the plaintiff and a state court judge granted summary judgment in favor of the creditor, even though the plaintiff asserted that the law firm misstated the amount of the debt. The plaintiff also attempted to argue that because the debt had been charged off, she did not owe it anymore.
After obtaining the judgment, the law firm began to garnish the plaintiff’s wages and filed a lien against her property. The plaintiff, in her suit, alleged that the actions of the law firm violated numerous provisions of the FDCPA.
Dispensing with the easiest of the claims first, Judge Stephanie K. Bowman of the District Court for the Southern District of Ohio ruled that the creditor is not a debt collector under the FDCPA. Then, she goes into why the plaintiff’s FDCPA claims are time-barred because the suit she filed was more than a year after the collection lawsuit was filed against her.
If that wasn’t enough, Judge Bowman wrote, then the claims would still be dismissed because the plaintiff failed to include any sufficient factual allegations against any defendant to support “her otherwise conclusory claims.” The plaintiff, for example, failed to allege that the credit card debt was a consumer debt and was incurred for personal, family or household purposes.
