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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.
April 29 was a busy day for Esther Baines of Winter Springs, Florida. It was on this day that she filed 10 different lawsuits, all against different collection operations, accusing them of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act by making unauthorized inquiries on her credit report. Each of the suits was filed in the District Court for the Middle District of Florida.
The Background: Each of the suits are nearly identical to one another. On or about April 20, the plaintiff checked her credit report. She noticed that each of the defendants made an unauthorized inquiry on her credit report — the inquiry was unauthorized because she allegedly never initiated a consumer transaction with the defendant or had an account with them, according to the complaints.
- The plaintiff “has the interest and right to be free from deceptive, misleading collections efforts.”
The Claims: But despite her claim that the collection efforts were misleading, the plaintiff only accuses the defendants of violating Section 1681b(f) of the FCRA by failing to have a permissible purpose to obtain her credit report.
- The plaintiff purportedly did not give written permission for the defendants to obtain her credit report and none of the defendants had a court order to obtain her credit report.
- The conduct of the defendants caused the plaintiff to suffer an invasion of privacy which caused “anxiety, emotional distress, a lot of time wasted, and loss of sleep.”
- In making her claim for damages, the plaintiff writes, “Without what the defendant did, I wouldn’t be going through this. Their actions stripped me of my rights and plunged me into a whirlwind of emotional distress, anxiety, and invasion of privacy. It’s all connected — their behavior directly caused the harm I am experiencing.”
