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Quick analysis: It’s Opposite Month!

May 2022 has defied every trendline in the consumer complaint and litigation spheres. TCPA and FDCPA lawsuits have been pretty consistently trending downward, while FCRA lawsuits and CFPB complaints have been trending upward. Not so this month. Turn it all around, you have TCPA (+6.8%) and FDCPA (+7.9%) both up over the previous month, and FCRA (-10.3%) and CFPB complaints (-25.3%) both down from the previous month. Having said that, one month of backwards numbers isn’t enough to significantly throw off the YTD trends, which still show FDCPA (-17.1%) and TCPA (-29%) down and FCRA (+7.0%) up. YTD CFPB complaints are in the negative, but that is almost certainly temporary.

In other news, putative class actions represented 10.2% of FDCPA, 55.2% of TCPA and 3.0% of FCRA lawsuits filed last month. About 42% of all plaintiffs who filed suit last month had filed at least once before. And finally, Georgia attorney Matthew Thomas Berry took the top spot for representing the most consumers in April (21) while Florida attorney Jibrael S Hindi has represented the most consumers for the year so far (206).

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
May 01, 2022
May 31, 2022		 Apr 01, 2022
Apr 30, 2022		 May 01, 2021
May 31, 2021		 Jan 01, 2022
May 31, 2022		 Jan 01, 2021
May 31, 2021
CFPB  4495 6014 -25.3% 5432 -17.2% 27210 28235 -3.6%
FDCPA  410 380 7.9% 615 -33.3% 2260 2725 -17.1%
FCRA  463 516 -10.3% 428 8.2% 2420 2262 7.0%
TCPA  125 117 6.8% 112 11.6% 602 848 -29.0%

 

Complaint Statistics:

4495 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 891 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from May 01, 2022 to May 31, 2022.

  • 4495 CFPB Complaints
  • 410 FDCPA, 42 Class Action (10.2%)
  • 125 TCPA, 69 Class Action (55.2%)
  • 463 FCRA, 14 Class Action (3.0%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 891 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 374, or (42%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 3820 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 147 different US District Court branches.
  • About 600 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 57 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 54 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 46 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 33 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 32 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 27 Lawsuits: California Southern District Court – San Diego
  • 25 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 24 Lawsuits: Indiana Southern District Court – Indianapolis
  • 23 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas
  • 21 Lawsuits: New Jersey District Court – Newark

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 21 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 18 Consumers: MICHAEL FREDERICK CARDOZA
  • Representing 16 Consumers: MANUEL SANTIAGO HIRALDO
  • Representing 15 Consumers: DAVID J PHILIPPS
  • Representing 15 Consumers: YAAKOV SAKS
  • Representing 14 Consumers: GEORGE HAINES
  • Representing 14 Consumers: JOHN THOMAS STEINKAMP
  • Representing 14 Consumers: MICHAEL KIND
  • Representing 14 Consumers: CHRISTOPHER NEIL ARMOR
  • Representing 14 Consumers: GERARDO AVALOS

Statistics Year to Date:
4861 total lawsuits for 2022, including:

  • 2260 FDCPA
  • 2420 FCRA
  • 602 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2022: 4462 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 206 Consumers: JIBRAEL JARALLAH SAID HINDI
  • Representing 181 Consumers: THOMAS JOHN PATTI
  • Representing 122 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 122 Consumers: CRAIG CARLEY MARCHIANDO
  • Representing 117 Consumers: LEONARD ANTHONY BENNETT
  • Representing 110 Consumers: DREW DAVID SARRETT
  • Representing 79 Consumers: MICHAEL FREDERICK CARDOZA
  • Representing 74 Consumers: CHRISTOPHER NEIL ARMOR
  • Representing 60 Consumers: SYED HASEEB HUSSAIN

——————————————————————————————————-
CFPB Complaint Statistics:

There were 4495 complaints filed against debt collectors from May 01, 2022 to May 31, 2022.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 770

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 1158 Other debt (26%)
  • 1083 I do not know (24%)
  • 1077 Credit card debt (24%)
  • 731 Medical debt (16%)
  • 213 Auto debt (5%)
  • 99 Payday loan debt (2%)
  • 72 Mortgage debt (2%)
  • 32 Federal student loan debt (1%)
  • 30 Private student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 2353 Attempts to collect debt not owed (52%)
  • 876 Written notification about debt (19%)
  • 453 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (10%)
  • 420 False statements or representation (9%)
  • 313 Communication tactics (7%)
  • 80 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (2%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 1176 Debt is not yours (26%)
  • 708 Debt was result of identity theft (16%)
  • 564 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (13%)
  • 390 Debt was paid (9%)
  • 318 Attempted to collect wrong amount (7%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 612 Complaints: FL
  • 503 Complaints: TX
  • 425 Complaints: GA
  • 420 Complaints: CA
  • 252 Complaints: NY
  • 174 Complaints: IL
  • 155 Complaints: PA
  • 141 Complaints: VA
  • 139 Complaints: SC
  • 130 Complaints: NJ

The status of the month’s complaints are as follows:

  • 3474 Closed with explanation (77%)
  • 560 In progress (12%)
  • 379 Closed with non-monetary relief (8%)
  • 46 Untimely response (1%)
  • 36 Closed with monetary relief (1%)

This includes 4372 (97%) timely responses to complaints, and 123 (3%) untimely responses.

WebRecon LLC is a part of the Americloud Holdings LLC family of companies. (855) WEB-RECON

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API Access


We offer two powerful APIs to businesses that communicate with consumers:

  • The primary Litigious Consumer Scrub uses a combination of name, geography (and optionally SSN) to identify consumers who have filed lawsuits in the past.
  • The Litigious Consumer Phone Scrub pulls every phone number from our proprietary database of litigants and runs your phones against ours.

These APIs allow you to check your data against our database on the fly. Clients love using this to handle risk management without missing a beat in their daily workflow.

Workers Comp Scrub


Workers Comp-inspired FDCPA lawsuits are growing aggressively, particularly in Florida. Only WebRecon can tell you who in your database may have a Florida Worker’s Comp case filed that could trigger litigation against you.

You can’t stop 100% of all lawsuits, but if you collect medical in Florida and you don’t have a process in place to show the court that you have a way to check every file against the Workers Comp database, then you have lost the case before it even begins.

Knock these suits out of the park with the Workers Comp Scrub.

Our Monthly Client Newsletter with The Litigant Hotsheet


Anyone can get our guest newsletter, but only clients get the version with the Litigant Hotsheet –  identifying the most active consumer Plaintiffs filing suit in jurisdictions around the country each month. Grab a coffee, shut your door and open your database to make sure you are doing all you can to stay safe.

Individual Vendor Consumer Complaint Search


Just like Vendor Monitoring, but without the monitoring. Search any business’s history of consumer complaints (Litigation, CFPB, BBB, State AG) with the click of a button! Great for on-the-fly gut checks of the companies you do business with.

Vendor Monitoring


Through vicarious liability, you can be held accountable for the bad behavior of your vendors. If they abuse consumers, for all intents and purposes, so do you. This is a big freakin’ deal!

But fear not, friend. WebRecon can track consumer litigation, CFPB, BBB and State AG Office complaints against the companies you do business with.

When a new complaint of any kind is filed against any of the companies you are monitoring, we’ll automatically push a report out to you with all of the publicly available details so you can react accordingly and if necessary, protect your interests.

The Litigious Consumer Phone Scrub


Would you knowingly dial a number attached to a consumer with a history of litigation? Of course not.

But thousands of companies do just that, every single day. If you’d like to know who they are, simply review the court dockets. They are the ones getting sued the most.

Sure, you can stop dialing consumers. But your marketing and operations teams might not be too excited about that plan.

Another idea? Identify the consumers most likely to sue you, based on previous litigation histories, and just don’t call them.

Identify high-risk phones quickly & easily, before you expose yourself to unnecessary risk.

Litigation Context Search


This is really cool.

Our primary search engine is really designed to search for parties to litigation. Need to know more about a consumer plaintiff? That’s easy. Defendant? Check. Lawyer? No problem.

But if you need to find all 1099C lawsuits filed in July 2020… not so much.

Which is why we developed the Context Search. We have pulled out and indexed the full text from over 140k consumer lawsuits and made them available to you in a search engine, with more than 1000 new lawsuits added each month. Use it to search the text of filed litigation so you can easily identify those hard-to-define trends and cases worth following.

Individual Search Engine


Instantly and easily search our proprietary database for any lawsuit participant – Plaintiff, Defendant or Attorney.

In the results, we’ll show you the full consumer litigation history of any participant, including the “docket data” (who, what, why, where, when) and – in many cases – we can even provide a copy of their actual filed lawsuits.

You can also search by phone, date range, federal/state, class action, court, statute, etc. We offer a ton of flexibility to get you the exact search result you are looking for.

The Litigant Alert Ongoing Monitoring Process


Just like our one-time batch process, but without the whole “one time” thing.

When one of your consumers files new litigation against anyone in the future, you should be the first to know. Our monitoring service can make that happen.

WebRecon can monitor your entire database (or any segment of it) for future instances of consumer litigation filed by the very consumers you are working with, right now!

It is simple to add new consumers to the watchlist, remove inactive accounts, download full reports, etc.

Best of all, we only charge you for the volume of your monitoring database – not the frequency of the searches. Search daily, weekly, every Tuesday and Friday, the 15th of each month, whatever – it is totally up to you! You won’t pay a penny more.

The Litigant Alert One-Time Batch Process


This is our flagship service. Find out why hundreds of companies won’t contact any consumers before running them through WebRecon’s Litigant Alert.

This process identifies consumers with a history of litigation quickly & easily. If they have ever filed lawsuits under FDCPA, TCPA, FCRA or similar statutes, you’ll find out here. 

WebRecon’s proprietary database is simply the most comprehensive collection of dangerous consumer litigation data in existence. 

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