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 [email protected] 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.
You may have noticed that I changed the format of how I write summaries of cases and complaints several months ago, introducing bullet points and headings to make the posts easier to read. It appears as though that trend has made its way into the world of Fair Debt Collection Practices Act complaints. A collection operation is facing an FDCPA lawsuit for using an unlicensed collector, failure to provide a proper validation and dispute notice, and for parking the debt without first notifying the plaintiff, but perhaps what is most interesting about the complaint is the way in which the plaintiff lays out why she has standing to pursue this case in federal court.
The Background: This past January, the plaintiff received a written demand to pay a debt. This communication upset the plaintiff because she had previously disputed the debt with the original creditor and was not warned that it was being sent to the defendant for collection. The letter was signed by an individual who was purportedly not licensed to collect debts in the great state of Minnesota.
- The letter also failed to disclose the plaintiff’s rights under Section 1692g of the FDCPA, according to the complaint.
- Finally, the complaint accuses the defendant of furnishing information about the debt to the credit reporting agencies before communicating with the plaintiff about the debt.
The Claims: The complaint accuses the defendant of violating multiple sections of the FDCPA. It also lays out all the reasons why the plaintiff has standing to sue, under the headings, Harms: Emotional, Harms: Economic, Harms: Legal, Harms: Reputational, Harms: Informational, and Harms: Future Risks. Each heading has a number of bullet points listed, such as Spending time, energy, money to learn the truth and Lost work time under Harms: Economic. For non-lawyers like myself, it makes understanding the claims being made a lot easier.