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.
Parsing the language of a possible dispute/refusal to pay/cease communication message from a consumer might be the riskiest of minefields for companies in the credit and collection industry today. There are consumers who are genuinely trying to inform a collection operation of their situation, there are those that are genuine and using language they found on social media which purports to “work at getting debt collectors off your back”, and there are those who are using the message as a stall tactic or trying to get out of paying the debt altogether. How can you know which of those situations is yours when you receive a message from a consumer that says, “Going through some financial hardship right now and I can’t spare a dime right now”? Especially when the message is proactive and sent before you have any communication with the individual?
The background: There isn’t much meat to this complaint, filed in the District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiff checked her credit report last month and noticed that the defendant was attempting to collect an unpaid cable debt in the amount of $208.
- The plaintiff sent the defendant a letter that only stated the sentence above. Nothing more, nothing less. This, according to the complaint, was the plaintiff invoking Section 1692c(c) of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and requesting that communications cease.
- The defendant sent the plaintiff an email a few days later that stated, “Thank you for contacting us. I’m sorry to hear you are going through a rough patch and hope things start to look up soon. Would you be able to make a small good faith payment? I’ve attached a link to our payment plan options below. [The defendant] is a debt collection agency and this is an attempt to collect a debt.”
- The email included a link to view the payment plan options and a phone number.
- The defendant’s actions caused the plaintiff to become anxious, unable to focus, and forced her to incur the loss of time and the loss of money, in the form of postage used to send her message to the defendant.
The claims: The plaintiff claims the defendant violated Section 1692c(c) of the FDCPA.
