The stating of a representative’s personal name is immaterial to whether there is a meaningful disclosure of the caller’s identity as required by the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act , said the district court for the District of Oregon.  In Moore v. Account Control Technology, Inc., the court granted the defendant’s motion for summary judgment, holding that the defendant’s telephone calls to the debtor plaintiff did not violate the FDCPA.   

As background, the plaintiff owed a debt to a community college, which placed that debt with defendant Account Control Technology, Inc. (“ACT”).  ACT then attempted to collect on the debt by placing phone calls to the plaintiff.  During each of those phone calls, the ACT representative identified himself or herself as such and also stated that the call was from a debt collector.  Plaintiff brought suit alleging that ACT violated the FDCPA by failing to provide a meaningful disclosure of the caller’s identity.   

On summary judgment, ACT argued that it made meaningful disclosures of the caller’s identity by providing the name of the debt collection entity and stating that “this is a call from a debt collector.”  In response, the plaintiff argued that the agent must disclose his or her name as well as the debt collection entity the agent represents.   

The Court rejected Plaintiff’s “nonpersuasive and nonsensical argument.”  Besides the fact that the plaintiff failed to cite any authority in support of her proposition, the Court found that a representative’s name is not “meaningful” to a consumer – “the human caller is not the entity which owns or seeks the debt; the consumer would not satisfy the debt by writing a check to the representative personally; nor would the consumer sue the representative personally for violating the FDCPA.”   

Finding that “[t]he messages left by ACT made no attempt to conceal any information about the calling party or the nature [of] the call,” the Court held that “the disclosure in this action was ‘meaningful.’”