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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.
There is a line of thinking in this industry that it’s safer to mark anything that looks or sounds like it might be a dispute from a consumer as a dispute. In this case, the plaintiff has accused the defendant of violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act because it marked the account as disputed and reported that to the credit reporting agencies, even though the plaintiff alleges she was just refusing to pay the debt and was not disputing it.
The background: Last August, the plaintiff sent the defendant a letter, refusing to pay the debt. The plaintiff claims she was not disputing the debt, merely indicating she refused to pay the debt and that she did not want to be contacted by the defendant.
- A month later, the plaintiff checked her credit report and saw that the account in question was now marked as disputed.
- There are some claims in the complaint that don’t exactly make a lot of sense and line up with the events detailed above. For example, the complaint accuses the defendant of failing to investigate or otherwise verify the plaintiff’s removal of dispute/refusal to pay before voluntarily re-reporting the debt. But there is no duty to investigate a debt unless it was being disputed, isn’t there? And why was the debt being re-reported? There is only one mention of it being reported in the first place.
- Furthermore, the plaintiff claims that the defendant furnished information to the credit reporting agencies regarding the plaintiff’s account without notifying them that the account had been undisputed by the plaintiff, even after receiving notice of the removal of the dispute. Was the debt disputed and then undisputed? Again, it’s not clear from the complaint.
The claims: The complaint accuses the defendant of violating Sections 1692d, 1692e, 1692e(8), and 1692f of the FDCPA and Sections 1681s-2(B) of the FCRA for marking the account as disputed and failing to correct the account.
- The plaintiff claims that the defendant’s conduct caused her to suffer emotional damage through the loss of credit, loss of the ability to purchase and benefit from credit, and the mental and emotional pain, anguish, humiliation, and embarrassment of credit denials.
