Like the 80 inches of snow that pummeled Buffalo this week, the crusade against time-barred debt continues to hammer the collection industry. Today the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit denied a petition for leave to file an interlocutory appeal in the matter of Patrick v. PYOD, LLC. Earlier this summer, a judge sitting in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana denied a collector’s motion to dismiss an FDCPA complaint based on the filing of a proof of claim on a debt that was beyond the statute of limitations. Relying on Randolph v.…
Posts published in November 2014
It has been several months since the Eleventh Circuit handed down its decision holding that filing a proof of claim on “time-barred” debt violates the FDCPA. The request for rehearing, which I reported about this past summer, was denied. While a petition for certification to the Supreme Court is possible, even if the court accepts the case (and that’s a tall order itself) we would not see a decision before 2016. A Multitude of Crawford-type Claims While it was a safe bet a new round of FDCPA claims would be spawned by Crawford, the sheer number of claims being filed outside the Eleventh Circuit is surprising.…
The Federal Trade Commission has posted seven steps debt brokers should follow to keep data secure on the Bureau of Consumer Protection’s Business Center Blog. This latest guidance comes after the FTC requested that a federal court order two debt brokers that exposed the personal information of more than 70,000 consumers online to notify the consumers and give them direction on how to protect themselves against fraud and identity theft. According to the FTC, two debt brokers violated the FTC Act when they placed the personal information of the consumers, including bank account and credit card numbers, birth dates, employment information and more, on a…
The GOP victory in yesterday’s mid-term elections probably will not translate into any immediate relief for the consumer financial services industry. But if you are looking for any sign of where things might be heading, know that voters handily rejected many candidates Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the unofficial founder of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, stumped for this election cycle. Martha Coakley, the Massachusetts Attorney General, spent the last few years promulgating some of the most restrictive debt collection regulations in the nation. Warren was a frequent campaign companion, but it didn’t help Coakley in the end, she lost her bid…