Dunham v. Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC
- Citation:
- Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, Docket no. 11-1553
- Tag(s):
-
- Ruling:
- For the Purposes of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), a non-debtor mistakenly targeted by a debt-collection effort is a "consumer" protected by the Act. But while a person mistakenly identified as a "debtor" is a consumer for FDCPA purposes who is protected by the FDCPA and has the right to "debt verification," the debt collector discharges its verification obligation to that person by identify that the debt is owed by a different person through disclosing the last four numbers of the intended debtor's social security number, and accordingly does not breach the FDCPA.
- Procedural context:
- The Plaintiff sought discovery sanctions and certification as a representative in a class action against a debt collector that had sent a demand to the Plaintiff and followed up with a verification that was partially deficient but that indicated the person against whom they sought to collect had a different final four digits in their social security number. The District Court had held that since the Plaintiff and the person against who the debt was being collected were not identical, the Plaintiff was not a "consumer" protected under the FDCPA, having concluded that "the plain language of sec. 1692a(3)'s 'consumer' definition does not apply" to a person the collector mistakenly alleges owes a debt. The District Court then reasoned that because the erroneous person was not a consumer, the debt verification provisions did not apply. Judgment affirmed on other grounds.
- Facts:
- The Plaintiff, a lawyer, received a debt collection letter that had been sent in error. The letter had been intended for a person with the same name as the Plaintiff. The Plaintiff responded to the original letter by seeking the verification of the debt, the collector responded, partially (it omitted the original amount of the debt, the date incurred, or the goods and services for which incurred), but with enough information for the Plaintiff to know the letter had been intended for someone else, as the verification identified a person with different four final numbers in their social security number. The Plaintiff then did nothing for a year, at which time he brought the instant law suit and sought discovery sanctions for the late production of certain information and more importantly, sough class certification.
- Judge(s):
- Melloy, Smith, and Benton, Circuit Judges, Opinion by Smith.
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