In a case where Xerxes Martin of Martin Golden Lyons Watts Morgan represented one of the defendants, a District Court judge in Texas has granted a defendant’s motion to dismiss a Fair Credit Reporting Act case where the plaintiff claimed to be the victim of “reverse identity theft” and denied filing for bankruptcy protection five times, which the credit reporting agencies included in her credit report.
The background: The plaintiff filed this lawsuit earlier this year, accusing all three of the major credit reporting agencies and one other company of violating the FCRA by inappropriately placing false and derogatory information on her credit report, which negatively impacted her ability to obtain credit with certain merchants.
- The plaintiff claimed she did not file the bankruptcies that appeared on her credit report and filed suit when the defendants failed to remove the offending information.
- The defendants pointed to five filings for Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection filed by the plaintiff between March 2018 and June 2019 — each of which was made voluntarily.
- The plaintiff claims not to have authorized the bankruptcy filings and accused the defendants of failing to verify whether she filed them or not even while they were refusing to remove them from her credit report.
The ruling: To reach his ruling, all Judge Kenneth M. Hoyt of the District Court for the Southern District of Texas had to do was lay out what needed to happen in order for the plaintiff to have filed for bankruptcy protection on each of the five occasions.
- Either the plaintiff, or someone acting on her behalf, knew the financial condition of the plaintiff concerning particular creditors, the plaintiff’s Social Security number – specifically the last four digits, the plaintiff’s address and telephone number, the plaintiff’s date of birth and the case numbers of each of the filing. Moreover, the filer knew the plaintiff’s name and correct spelling, as reflected in the several petitions.
- There is nothing in the record to show what the plaintiff has done to uncover the alleged fraud related to the bankruptcy filings, Judge Hoyt noted. And ultimately, the job of the credit reporting agencies is to report what is accurate. And nobody argues that the bankruptcy petitions were never filed in the first place.
