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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.
I originally chose to write about this particular lawsuit because it is one of the first that I have seen to reference the recent changes by the credit reporting agencies to stop including information about medical debts under $500 on consumers’ credit reports, but digging deeper into the complaint, there were some other interesting allegations as well.
A copy of the complaint, filed in the District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, can be accessed using case number 23-cv-01014 or by clicking here.
The plaintiff incurred a healthcare debt for $199 — after paying his $100 co-payment — back in 2020. The plaintiff contacted the defendant to learn more about the debt after seeing it on his credit report, but he refused to verify his identity with the representative and the call ended.
Fast forward to 2023 and the plaintiff learned that the credit reporting agencies were now removing medical debts under $500 from consumers’ credit reports. The plaintiff contacted all three major credit reporting agencies to have the item removed from his credit report. Two of the three agencies did so immediately. Equifax did not remove the item. The plaintiff filed a dispute through Equifax’s dispute portal and the dispute was communicated to the defendant. A month later, the plaintiff received dispute results from two different collection accounts with different account numbers. Rather than delete one account, the defendant allegedly duplicated the debt, according to the complaint. On top of that, the defendant did not report the debts as being disputed.
The plaintiff again submitted a dispute through Equifax’s dispute portal, disputing both debts, and the disputes were communicated to the defendant. The plaintiff also called the defendant and disputed the debt directly with it.
The plaintiff received the dispute results and this time the defendant verified the two accounts and added a third account with a different number.
Then, the defendant responded with the results of its direct investigation, informing the plaintiff that it had “been unable to obtain the documentation necessary to support the continued collection of this account.”
The complaint accuses the defendant of violating Section 1682s-2(b) of the Fair Credit Reporting Act and Sections 1692e(8), 1692d, 1692e(5), 1592f, and 1692f(1) of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.