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.
What makes being in the credit and collection industry so frustrating, is that you can do everything by the book and it still doesn’t stop someone from suing you. In this case, a collection operation is claims it violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Fair Debt Collection Practices Act after the consumer received an alert about a debt being added to her credit report.
The background: Let’s start with the information that is in the complaint. Back in June of 2024, the plaintiff received an alert from a credit monitoring service that an account had been placed on her credit report. Looking into her report, the plaintiff claims this was the first time she had learned of the debt’s existence.
- The plaintiff allegedly sent a letter to the defendant in which she refused to pay the debt, requested that all communications be ceased, and that collection attempts to her or any third party be stopped.
- Weeks later, the plaintiff noticed that the defendant was still communicating with the credit reporting agencies about her debt, which she took as the defendant ignoring her request related to collection attempts with third parties.
- The plaintiff then submitted a complaint to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
- The defendant responded to the complaint, saying it had no record of the correspondence that the plaintiff allegedly sent, but that it would follow the cease and desist request going forward.
- A few weeks later, “coming home from a long day of work,” the plaintiff retrieved the mail and went into her house, only to find another letter from the defendant. This letter caused “marital strife” between the plaintiff and her husband because her husband believed “that his wife hadn’t been honest about dealing” with the defendant.
Now, let’s look at what was in the communications.
- In its response to the CFPB complaint, the defendant informed the plaintiff and the Bureau that, even though it was reporting information it believed to be accurate, it was extending a courtesy and removing the related entries from the plaintiff’s credit report.
- The letter — the one that caused the “marital strife” was a form letter informing the plaintiff that the defendant had conducted an investigation into the account and was sending the plaintiff the validation information it had on the account, which included an account summary from the original creditor.
The claims: The plaintiff is claiming 18 different violations of the FDCPA and FCRA in her complaint. The allegations including not notifying the plaintiff about the debt and reporting it to the credit reporting agencies — debt parking, accessing the plaintiff’s credit report without a permissible purpose, communicating with the plaintiff after receiving a cease and desist notice, and reporting false information to the credit reporting agencies.
