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.
One of the biggest worries that a lot of collection operations have is the threat of disclosing a debt to a third party, which, if not done properly, is a violation of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. What removes some of the fear, though, is that it has to be the intended consumer who files the suit — because that is the person whose information was compromised. What are the odds that someone receiving information about someone else can find that someone else, who then files a lawsuit? What are the odds indeed? (Do you see where this is going yet?)
While it’s not an FDCPA suit, an individual has filed a Fair Credit Reporting Act lawsuit, accusing one of the credit reporting agencies of violating the statute because it allegedly included some of the plaintiff’s information on someone else’s credit report, and that someone else tracked the plaintiff down and let her know.
The Background: Last November, Christina Jones, the plaintiff, received a text on her cell phone from someone identifying herself as Cristina Jones (note the slight difference in how the names are spelled). Cristina Jones had procured a copy of her own credit report and it contained information that was not hers on it.
- Christina Jones confirmed that the extra information on Cristina’s credit report was hers.
- The plaintiff then secured a copy of her own credit report and noted a Capital One account that did not belong to her. She then filed a dispute with the credit reporting agency.
- Capital One contacted the plaintiff and said that after conducting an investigation, the plaintiff was not responsible for the account and that it would ask the credit reporting agency to remove the item from her credit report.
- The plaintiff then filed suit against the credit reporting agency.
The Claims: The defendant is accused of violating Sections 1681b and 1681o of the FCRA by furnishing the plaintiff’s credit report without a permissible purpose and for allegedly doing so recklessly. Furnishing information from the plaintiff’s credit report to a person who had no reason to have it was an invasion of the plaintiff’s privacy, according to the complaint.
