In a case that was defended by Jonathan Robbin of J. Robbin Law, a state court judge in New Jersey has dismiss a Fair Debt Collection Practices Act class-action Hunstein case, ruling the plaintiffs failed to state a claim for which relief could be granted because transmitting information to a letter vendor for the purposes of printing and mailing a letter is not what Congress intended when it prohibited collectors from “communicating” information about a debt to third parties.
The Background: Back in 2020, the plaintiffs received a collection letter from the defendant. Upon information and belief, the plaintiffs claimed that the defendant transmitted information about them to a third party vendor, which used the information to print and mail the collection letters. The transmission of that personal information was a violation of the FDCPA, according to the plaintiffs, because the plaintiff did not permit the information to be transmitted.
The plaintiff filed suit, accusing the defendants of violating the FDCPA and the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act, and seeking to include anyone else from New Jersey or New York who received a similar letter from the defendants.
The Ruling: The defendants argued that the letter in question was not a communication in an attempt to collect a debt. The letter, according to the defendants, informed the plaintiff of her right under New York regulations to demand substantiation of the debt.
- Ultimately, the court ruled that the letter vendor in question is no different than a telephone or telegram operator engaged as the medium for an otherwise permitted communication.
- “To hold otherwise is to ignore the reality that debt collectors employ letter vendors to prepare correspondence necessary for their lawful operations and, in effect, to require such debt collectors necessarily to conduct business on a fully integrated basis without need for an outside letter vendor,” the judge wrote. “There is simply no basis in either the letter or the intendment of the FDCPA for any such conclusion.”
- “Unlike employers, neighbors, family members or friends of the debtor, the employees of a letter vendor possess no ability to inflict reputational or other harm on a debtor simply by processing the information into a template letter intended to be sent to the debtor. Moreover, there is no allegation in the present pleading of misuse of the data by the letter vendor, or its personnel, such as by selling or otherwise conveying the data to a third-party other than the debtor herself or even any allegation from which such harmful conduct might reasonably be inferred. The transmission of information to such employees, without more, is simply not the kind of abusive collection practice or method that the act sought to address.”
