According to a recent report by WebRecon, court filings under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) were slightly up while filings under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) remained unchanged for the month of July. Complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) were down for the month.
The U.S. Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether a homeowner association (HOA) assessment constitutes a “credit transaction” under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which would open up an inquiry to the fundamental scope of one of the FCRA’s most important permissible purposes.
A United States district court in Kentucky recently granted defendants’ motion to dismiss a case arising under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) for lack of personal jurisdiction.
According to a recent report by WebRecon, court filings under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) were down for the month of June. This reverses the upward swing seen in these filings in May. Complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) were down in May and remained down for June.
On July 27, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released a new blog post, positing that cashflow data, broadly defined as the various inflows, outflows, and accumulated amounts in a consumer’s checking and savings accounts, may provide lenders with a better picture of a consumer’s ability to repay their loans than using a credit score.
The modern “Information Age” has been defined by rapidly increasing interconnectivity and dependence on the internet by consumers and businesses alike. One side effect of these technological advances has been the increasing frequency of cyberattacks and data breaches perpetrated by sophisticated cyber criminals using ever-evolving methods of infiltration. And, as can be expected, along with the increase in data breaches over the past few decades, we have seen the rise of data breach litigation, and in particular, consumer class action litigation against the companies who have been victimized by those data breaches. The Fourth Circuit has seen several high-profile data breach class actions. Such class actions often face difficult uphill battles in proving the necessary elements for class certification, particularly when it comes to defining a theory of harm that can be proven by common evidence across the class. Last month, Judge Gibney of the Richmond Division of the Eastern District of Virginia dismissed one such data breach class action case for a more basic problem: the named plaintiffs could not demonstrate they had suffered any concrete injury sufficient to establish Article III standing at all, let alone damages that could be proven classwide. Holmes v. Elephant Ins. Co., No. 3:22cv487, 2023 WL 4183380 (E.D. Va. June 26, 2023).
In Frazier v. Dovenmuehle Mortgage, Inc., the Seventh Circuit recently issued an opinion affirming summary judgement in favor of the defendant data furnisher in a suit brought by a consumer under § 1681s-2(b) of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) requiring data furnishers upon notice of a dispute to “investigate the disputed data” and “correct or verify the information by returning the ACDV form to the credit reporting agency [CRA] with any amended or verified data inserted next to the old data.” The appellate court rejected the consumer’s argument that the information provided by the furnisher on an ACDV response to a CRA was materially misleading, even though the CRA’s inaccurate interpretation of the ACDV response led the CRA to report that the consumer was currently delinquent on a settled debt.
The drumbeat to increase regulation of tenant screening continues, this time in Michigan.
On June 15, Michigan state Representative Brenda Carter (D-29) introduced House Bill 4818, which proposes to amend landlord-tenant act 1972 PA 348. Specifically, the amendment proposes to exclude the credit score of a prospective Michigan tenant from being a deciding factor in determining the prospective tenant’s eligibility for a lease. Under the proposed amendment “credit score” is defined as, “the numerical score ranging from 300 to 850 assigned by a consumer reporting agency to measure credit risk.”
According to a recent report by WebRecon, the month of May saw a jump significant from the previous month in filings under the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), and the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), however, remained down.
On June 29, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the Western District of Wisconsin’s decision that an entity created under tribal law was entitled to immunity as an arm of the tribe and dismissed claims characterized as personal capacity claims against individual employees of the tribal entity as being inherently asserted against the tribe itself (ruling available here). This ruling recognizes the important role that sovereign immunity plays in the structuring of economic ventures for tribal communities and demonstrates how a properly enacted tribal code can safeguard immunity protections.