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.
A collection law firm is being sued for allegedly violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and state law in Georgia because it used a “false and misleading” affidavit to attest to the existence of a debt in a collection lawsuit. Among the allegations that purportedly made the affidavit false and misleading was a claim about the penmanship of the individual who notarized the document.
The background: The plaintiff was sued in Georgia state court to recover an unpaid debt. During the trial, the defendant submitted an affidavit from the original creditor, one of the world’s largest financial institutions.
- The plaintiff claims the individual who signed the affidavit did not have personal knowledge of the facts of the debt, which she attested to in the document.
- The affidavit that was used was a standard template used by the bank and was “robo-signed” by the individual, who purports “to have personal knowledge of the facts contained in the affidavit when in fact they do now have such personal knowledge.”
- The affidavit is then handed to another individual, who notarizes it, according to the complaint. But in this case, the notary’s signature was allegedly illegible and did not match the name on the notary’s commission, which constitutes an improper attestation, according to the complaint.
The claims: The complaint accuses the defendant of violating Section 1692e(10) of the FDCPA by introducing unauthenticated unsworn testimony during the trial, which allegedly misled the court about the debt’s validity.
- The complaint also accuses the defendant and the creditor of making willful misrepresentations of a material fact in violation of Georgia state law.
- The plaintiff is seeking actual and statutory damages for the alleged FDCPA violation and actual, statutory, and punitive damages for the alleged state law violation.
