At the end of February, the Ninth Circuit issued its decision in Six v. IQ Data International, where it reversed a district court’s dismissal of an FDCPA claim for lack of standing. The plaintiff’s claim was based on a violation of 15 U.S.C. § 1692c(a)(2), which prohibits a debt collector from directly communicating with a […]
Category Archives: Debt Collection
We received the following: HOUSTON – Multiple directly impacted people and groups have asked for permission in federal court to defend the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB’s) important recent rule to remove medical debt from credit reports. The National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) is representing Texas truck driver David Deeds and District of Columbia resident […]
As the federal government as we know it is eliminated, it is good to see a positive pro-consumer opinion out of the Eleventh Circuit today. In Booze v. Ocwen Loan Servicing, the Court of Appeals considered a question that had divided district courts–whether the FDCPA prohibits loan servicers from collecting “pay-to-pay” or “convenience” fees for the […]
Here, authored by Seth Frotman and Lorelei Salas. Here is a particularly intriguing excerpt: Now that companies are being held accountable for charging [certain] unlawful fees, they have switched to new, underhanded tactics to try to continue to extract junk fee revenue from people. For example, we have seen some debt collectors unlawfully amend consumers’ […]
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Federal Trade Commission this week issued their annual reporting of their debt collection activities. The CFPB, required under the Consumer Financial Protection Act to report to Congress annually on its activities to administer the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, recounted its ongoing work on medical debt. Notably, in […]
A home equity line of credit, or “HELOC,” is a loan product that allows a consumer to borrow money, using their equity in their home as collateral. William Lyons had taken out a HELOC from a predecessor to PNC Bank. Years later, PNC withdrew money from Lyons’ deposit account to offset outstanding payments on the […]
In 2018, a consumer brought a putative FDCPA class action based on a letter naming the collection arm of her credit card company, rather than the credit card company itself, as the “current/original creditor.” A federal district court granted the defendant’s motion to compel arbitration, and the parties arbitrated the dispute. After 4 years of […]
Kate Berry has an interesting article with some nice alliteration in the American Banker, Debt collectors defend doctors in skewering CFPB medical debt plan (behind paywall but available at Lexis). The CFPB has proposed to block medical debt from appearing in credit reports. The proposal is based in part on the theory that medical debt, because […]
Claire Johnson Raba of Illinois-Chicago and California-Irvine and Dalié Jiménez of California- Irvine and Harvard’s Center on the Legal Profession have written Pay to Plead: Finding Unfairness and Abusive Practices in California Debt Collection Cases. Here’s the abstract: In this Article, we report on one of the largest studies of debt collection lawsuits ever attempted. We […]
The National Center for Access to Justice at Fordham Law School has posted a report and online resource that ranks the 50 states and the District of Columbia on their adoption of policies promoting fairness in consumer debt litigation. The report notes that debt-collection lawsuits inundate courts across the country. Because many suits go unanswered, […]