A District Court judge in Maryland has granted a defendant’s motion to dismiss a Fair Credit Reporting Act lawsuit, ruling the plaintiff lacked standing because he never connected the allegedly contradictory reporting to any concrete harm.
The background: Back in 2021, the plaintiff deposited a $4,300 check from his bank account into his account with the defendant, a credit union.
- A representative of the defendant told the plaintiff the check had cleared, and he spent the money on ordinary personal expenses. About a week later, the defendant reversed course and said the check had not cleared, then charged off the resulting overdraft balance of $2,559 and furnished the account to the credit reporting agencies.
- The plaintiff did not dispute that the account was delinquent or that the charge-off was reported in error. Instead, he claimed the reporting was internally contradictory, listing a date of first delinquency in December 2021 while simultaneously showing his payments as “Paid on Time” through April 2022, with the charge-off not reported until May 2022.
- The plaintiff disputed the reporting with the CRAs, which deleted the tradeline, only for the defendant to re-insert it a few months later with the same contradiction. After further disputes at a branch and over the phone went nowhere, the plaintiff, representing himself, filed suit last August, asserting claims under the FCRA along with defamation, negligence, and Maryland Consumer Protection Act claims.
The ruling: Judge Julie R. Rubin of the District Court for the District of Maryland granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss, ruling the plaintiff lacked standing to pursue his FCRA claims.
- Judge Rubin acknowledged that damage to a credit score, difficulty obtaining credit, and reputational harm could all be concrete injuries, but wrote that the plaintiff never alleged facts showing those harms flowed from the specific inaccuracies he identified. Other courts have found it implausible that a consumer is worse off when reporting makes his account look more current than it actually was.
- His remaining claims of emotional distress and lost time were boilerplate allegations without supporting detail, which are insufficient to establish standing.
- The judge also noted that the plaintiff’s claim under section 1681s-2(a) of the FCRA failed as a matter of law because that provision has no private right of action, a point the plaintiff conceded.
- The MCPA claim was preempted by the FCRA to the extent it was based on the credit reporting, and the portions of the MCPA and negligence claims based on the mishandled check were barred by the three-year statute of limitations.
- The defamation and negligence claims survived the defendant’s preemption and timeliness arguments, but were dismissed anyway because they suffered from the same missing link between the inaccuracies and the claimed harm.
- The dismissal was without prejudice, and the plaintiff was given 14 days to seek leave to amend. Judge Rubin closed with a pointed reminder about Rule 11, noting the plaintiff had filed numerous meritless motions advancing arguments that were “patently (and verifiably) wrong,” and that discovery is not “a fishing expedition.”
