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Quick analysis: Lawsuits & Complaints Mostly Down

In April, CFPB complaints (-2.4%) and consumer lawsuits (TCPA -2.5%, FDCPA -24.2%) were mostly down, with the exception being FCRA litigation (+4.0%) which was up. This closely follows the YTD trend so far, with TCPA (-35.2%) and FDCPA (12.4%) down and FCRA (+6.7%) up, while CFPB complaints (-.7%) are down a sliver.

In other news, putative class actions represented 9.2% of FDCPA, 51.3% of TCPA and 1.7% of FCRA lawsuits filed last month. About 43% of all plaintiffs who filed suit last month had filed at least once before. And finally, Virginia attorneys Leonard Anthony Bennett, Craig Carley Marchiando, Drew David Sarrett shared the top spot for representing the most consumers in April (an explosive 107) while Florida attorney Jibrael S. Hindi has represented the most consumers for the year so far (199).

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
Apr 01, 2022
Apr 30, 2022		 Mar 01, 2022
Mar 31, 2022		 Apr 01, 2021
Apr 30, 2021		 Jan 01, 2022
Apr 30, 2022		 Jan 01, 2021
Apr 30, 2021
CFPB  5953 6102 -2.4% 5738 3.7% 22643 22803 -0.7%
FDCPA  379 500 -24.2% 585 -35.2% 1849 2110 -12.4%
FCRA  515 495 4.0% 446 15.5% 1956 1834 6.7%
TCPA  117 120 -2.5% 138 -15.2% 477 736 -35.2%

 

Complaint Statistics:

5953 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 903 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Apr 01, 2022 to Apr 30, 2022.

  • 5953 CFPB Complaints
  • 379 FDCPA, 35 Class Action (9.2%)
  • 117 TCPA, 60 Class Action (51.3%)
  • 515 FCRA, 9 Class Action (1.7%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 903 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 392, or (43%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 3172 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 138 different US District Court branches.
  • About 570 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 113 Lawsuits: Virginia Eastern District Court – Richmond
  • 51 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 44 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 41 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 35 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 32 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 27 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 24 Lawsuits: Indiana Southern District Court – Indianapolis
  • 21 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Fort Lauderdale
  • 20 Lawsuits: Minnesota District Court – Dmn

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 107 Consumers: LEONARD ANTHONY BENNETT
  • Representing 107 Consumers: CRAIG CARLEY MARCHIANDO
  • Representing 106 Consumers: DREW DAVID SARRETT
  • Representing 19 Consumers: MICHAEL FREDERICK CARDOZA
  • Representing 17 Consumers: SYED HASEEB HUSSAIN
  • Representing 16 Consumers: JOHN THOMAS STEINKAMP
  • Representing 15 Consumers: THOMAS JOHN PATTI
  • Representing 14 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 13 Consumers: GLORIA CHI-KI LAM
  • Representing 13 Consumers: KYLE W SCHUMACHER

Statistics Year to Date:
3965 total lawsuits for 2022, including:

  • 1849 FDCPA
  • 1956 FCRA
  • 477 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2022: 3637 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 199 Consumers: JIBRAEL JARALLAH SAID HINDI
  • Representing 180 Consumers: THOMAS JOHN PATTI
  • Representing 116 Consumers: CRAIG CARLEY MARCHIANDO
  • Representing 113 Consumers: LEONARD ANTHONY BENNETT
  • Representing 106 Consumers: DREW DAVID SARRETT
  • Representing 101 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 61 Consumers: MICHAEL FREDERICK CARDOZA
  • Representing 60 Consumers: CHRISTOPHER NEIL ARMOR
  • Representing 52 Consumers: SYED HASEEB HUSSAIN

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

There were 5953 complaints filed against debt collectors from Apr 01, 2022 to Apr 30, 2022.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 854

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 1535 Other debt (26%)
  • 1446 I do not know (24%)
  • 1438 Credit card debt (24%)
  • 958 Medical debt (16%)
  • 265 Auto debt (4%)
  • 149 Payday loan debt (3%)
  • 72 Mortgage debt (1%)
  • 45 Private student loan debt (1%)
  • 45 Federal student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 3077 Attempts to collect debt not owed (52%)
  • 1334 Written notification about debt (22%)
  • 528 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (9%)
  • 491 False statements or representation (8%)
  • 433 Communication tactics (7%)
  • 90 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (2%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 1552 Debt is not yours (26%)
  • 913 Debt was result of identity theft (15%)
  • 749 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (13%)
  • 548 Didnt receive notice of right to dispute (9%)
  • 528 Debt was paid (9%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 871 Complaints: FL
  • 609 Complaints: TX
  • 496 Complaints: CA
  • 468 Complaints: GA
  • 312 Complaints: PA
  • 281 Complaints: NY
  • 220 Complaints: IL
  • 175 Complaints: NJ
  • 173 Complaints: NC
  • 173 Complaints: OH

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

  • 4620 Closed with explanation (78%)
  • 637 In progress (11%)
  • 602 Closed with non-monetary relief (10%)
  • 53 Untimely response (1%)
  • 41 Closed with monetary relief (1%)

This includes 5790 (97%) timely responses to complaints, and 163 (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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