A District Court judge in Florida has refused to dismiss a consumer’s Fair Debt Collection Practices Act lawsuit over two voicemails left by a collection operation after the plaintiff said she could only be reached on weekends, ruling that her revised complaint now describes the messages in enough detail to proceed.
The background: The dispute grew out of a medical debt and a series of calls the plaintiff says came at the wrong times.
- The defendant, a debt collector, first tried to reach the plaintiff by phone last fall about a hospital bill but missed her.
- When the plaintiff returned the call over the holidays, she told the defendant she was only available to discuss the debt on weekends.
- The defendant left two voicemails on consecutive weekdays in early January anyway, each identifying itself as a debt collector calling about the hospital account and asking her to call back.
- The plaintiff said the messages caused her stress, wasted her time, and cut into her workday, and she sued under the FDCPA, claiming the contacts came at a time the defendant knew was inconvenient.
- An earlier version of her complaint was dismissed because it referred only to “weekday communications” without saying what they were. She refiled the complaint with the voicemail details.
The ruling: Judge John Antoon II of the District Court for the Middle District of Florida denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss, finding the plaintiff cleared both obstacles the defendant raised.
- On standing, the judge again found the plaintiff alleged a real injury. Emotional distress, lost time, and a disrupted workday were enough at this stage, he held, noting that a concrete injury “need be only an ‘identifiable trifle'” and that unwanted collection contact resembles the long-recognized harm of intrusion on a person’s privacy.
- On whether she stated a valid claim, the judge reached the opposite result from the earlier round. This time the complaint quotes the actual voicemail language, and the judge found that messages about collecting a debt fall squarely within the statute’s definition of a “communication.”
- The difference, the judge explained, was specificity. Saying only that “communications” occurred had not been enough; describing what the defendant actually said was.
