In February, Massachusetts Attorney General Joy Campbell announced a $6.5 million settlement with Safe Home Security, its CEO, and affiliated companies to resolve allegations that their practices violated state consumer protection laws by “trapping Massachusetts consumers in long-term auto renewal contracts” and engaging in illegal debt collection practices, among other activities.
According to the Consent
On February 27, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon signed into law House Bill 284, which requires debt buyers be licensed as “collection agencies” starting July 1, 2023.
The bill was introduced at the request of the Receivables Management Association International (RMAI) to address an emerging debate as to whether debt buyers should have been licensed
A district court in the Northern District of California recently denied in part a motion for judgment on the pleadings in a case alleging violations of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), and California’s Rosenthal Act involving collection texts sent to a consumer.
On February 13, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision of an Eastern District of New York court and found that the defendant law firm, Mandarich Law Group, LLC (Mandarich), had conducted a meaningful attorney review of the plaintiff debtor’s account prior to mailing her a debt collection letter on the firm’s letterhead.
After lengthy discovery and litigation, a U.S. district court judge in the Western District of New York ended a class action lawsuit by holding that communications between attorneys are not actionable under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA).
In (Fein Such), the plaintiffs filed a class action complaint alleging that Fein Such made improper
As discussed here, on September 8, 2022, an en banc panel of the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court’s decision that a debt collector’s outsourcing of its letter process to a third-party mail vendor violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act’s prohibition on third-party disclosure. The Eleventh Circuit remanded the case
On January 19, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Virginia entered an order sanctioning a collections law firm for violating the bankruptcy discharge injunction. The court in Skaggs v. Gooch (In re Skaggs) awarded the debtor $25,000 in attorneys’ fees based on a letter he received concerning a discharged
On February 14, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released a report entitled Market Snapshot: An Update on Third-Party Debt Collections Tradelines Reporting. The report sought to examine trends in the reporting of debt in collections from 2018 to 2022. Based on the CFPB’s Consumer Credit Panel, a nationally representative sample of approximately five
In a recent decision, a Michigan district court found that because there was a genuine issue of fact as to whether the defendant debt collector notified the consumer reporting agency (CRA) to remove a disputed debt notification from the plaintiff’s tradeline, the case could proceed to trial.
In Snyder v. LVNV Funding LLC, et al., the plaintiff filed a putative class action lawsuit against LVNV Funding LLC (LVNV) and Sequium Asset Solutions, LLC (SAS), alleging a letter from SAS offering a settlement of her debt violated sections 1692e(2)(A) and 1692g(a)(1) of the Federal Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA). The court held