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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.
For those of you who subscribe to the theory that there is a correlation between the length of a complaint and its severity, I give you this lawsuit as the exception to that rule. A company collecting on its own accounts is facing a class-action lawsuit in California federal court accusing it of violating the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the Rosenthal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by allegedly placing too many calls in too short a period of time. The issue, it appears, is whether the call frequency limit in Regulation F is triggered by seven calls in a seven-day period or by more than seven calls.
The background: The allegations section of the complaint is two sentences long. It says that between February 3 and February 12, the defendant placed eight calls to the plaintiff in an attempt to collect a debt. The defendant is identified in the complaint as the creditor of the debt.
- The class allegations twice refer to the calls as “electronic” communications and state that class members can be identified from the defendant’s “e-mail records,” language that appears to have been carried over from a different complaint.
- The only exhibit is a screenshot of a call log from the plaintiff’s cell phone, in which the defendant’s number is saved as a debt collection contact. The log shows one call on February 3, three calls on February 6, three calls on February 10, and one call on February 12.
- Seven of the eight calls were missed. The one call that was answered, on February 6, lasted six seconds, according to the exhibit.
- The span between the first and last call is ten days. The busiest seven-day window, February 6 through February 12, contains exactly seven calls.
The claims: The complaint accuses the defendant of violating Section 1692d(5) of the FDCPA, which prohibits “engaging any person in telephone conversation repeatedly or continuously with intent to annoy, abuse, or harass any person at the called number” and Section 1006.14 of Reg F, which prohibits “plac[ing] a telephone call to a particular person in connection with the collection of a particular debt . . . [m]ore than seven times within seven consecutive days,” according to the complaint.
- The complaint also accuses the defendant of violating Section 1788.17 of the RFDCPA, which incorporates Section 1692d(5) of the FDCPA.
- The complaint seeks to include anyone living in the United States who received seven or more calls within seven consecutive days from the defendant.
