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.
Usually, I look through WebRecon’s database to find a complaint that I think is interesting, noteworthy, or bizarre enough that it bears spotlighting it for the ARM industry. Today, I don’t just bring you one complaint; I bring you two. These are emblematic of a growing number of complaints I am seeing where individuals send notifications to collection operations indicating which communication channels the individuals want collectors to use, only to have the collector send the next communication in a different way.
The Background: These complaints have a similar structure and backstory to them. The two complaints here involve plaintiffs who sent the defendant a notification — both by letter — each of which indicated that email was the only convenient form of communication.
- Subsequently, each plaintiff received a letter in the mail from the defendants, generally in the form of a dispute response letter or debt verification letter.
- The plaintiffs then turn around and file Fair Debt Collection Practices Act lawsuits against the defendants, alleging they violated Section 1692c(a)(1) by communicating with the plaintiff at a place the defendant knew or should have known was no longer convenient.
The Lesson: There are a number of possible reasons why the defendants in these cases did what they did, and there are likely arguments to be made whether the plaintiffs even have standing to sue in the first place, but this does appear to be the next piece of low-hanging fruit that consumers are looking to pluck from the FDCPA tree, given the number of complaints I have seen in the past month or so that look and read exactly like these two complaints do.
