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Quick analysis: Summer Vacations are Over

After a summer season where most litigation was either consistently down or only marginally increasing, August litigation and consumer complaints rebounded with double-digit increases across the board.

TCPA (+33.3%) led the month with the stongest increase, followed by FDCPA (+15.5%) and FCRA (+11.9%). FCRA is still the only statute ahead of last year in the YTD column (+4.2%) whole TCPA (-20%) and FDCPA (-25.5%) are still in the negatives. A few more months like August, and that could easily change.

CFPB complaints against collectors and creditors were also up strong for the month (+12.5%), but are still down for the year (-15.6%).

In other news, putative class actions represented 9.9% of FDCPA, 48.8% of TCPA and 3.2% of FCRA lawsuits filed last month. About 42% of all plaintiffs who filed suit last month had filed at least once before. And finally, Las Vegas attorney Michael Kind make his debut at the top of this list for representing the most consumers in August (26)* while Florida attorney Jibrael S Hindi has still represented the most consumers for the year so far (228).

* Technically Shireen Hormozdi Bowman represented 30 consumers, but 27 of them were in one lawsuit so we are giving the title to Michael Kind.

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
Aug 01, 2022
Aug 31, 2022		 Jul 01, 2022
Jul 31, 2022		 Aug 01, 2021
Aug 31, 2021		 Jan 01, 2022
Aug 31, 2022		 Jan 01, 2021
Aug 31, 2021
CFPB  4984 4431 12.5% 6190 -19.5% 41668 49371 -15.6%
FDCPA  372 322 15.5% 601 -38.1% 3358 4510 -25.5%
FCRA  497 444 11.9% 473 5.1% 3830 3674 4.2%
TCPA  168 126 33.3% 120 40.0% 1027 1283 -20.0%

 

Complaint Statistics:

4984 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 919 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Aug 01, 2022 to Aug 31, 2022.

  • 4984 CFPB Complaints
  • 372 FDCPA, 37 Class Action (9.9%)
  • 168 TCPA, 82 Class Action (48.8%)
  • 497 FCRA, 16 Class Action (3.2%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 919 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 389, or (42%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 2846 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 147 different US District Court branches.
  • About 672 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 62 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 53 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 46 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 38 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas
  • 30 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 29 Lawsuits: Minnesota District Court – Dmn
  • 25 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 25 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Orlando
  • 24 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 22 Lawsuits: California Southern District Court – San Diego

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 30 Consumers: SHIREEN HORMOZDI BOWMAN
  • Representing 26 Consumers: MICHAEL KIND
  • Representing 26 Consumers: GERARDO AVALOS
  • Representing 26 Consumers: GEORGE HAINES
  • Representing 26 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 17 Consumers: CHRISTOPHER NEIL ARMOR
  • Representing 16 Consumers: SYED HASEEB HUSSAIN
  • Representing 16 Consumers: CATRINA EOM SMITH
  • Representing 15 Consumers: JOHN W KAUFFMAN
  • Representing 10 Consumers: CARL SCHWARTZ

Statistics Year to Date:
7511 total lawsuits for 2022, including:

  • 3358 FDCPA
  • 3830 FCRA
  • 1027 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2022: 6796 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 228 Consumers: JIBRAEL JARALLAH SAID HINDI
  • Representing 195 Consumers: THOMAS JOHN PATTI
  • Representing 179 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 134 Consumers: CRAIG CARLEY MARCHIANDO
  • Representing 127 Consumers: LEONARD ANTHONY BENNETT
  • Representing 116 Consumers: DREW DAVID SARRETT
  • Representing 107 Consumers: CHRISTOPHER NEIL ARMOR
  • Representing 106 Consumers: MICHAEL FREDERICK CARDOZA
  • Representing 99 Consumers: SYED HASEEB HUSSAIN
  • Representing 85 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM

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

There were 4984 complaints filed against debt collectors from Aug 01, 2022 to Aug 31, 2022.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 818

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 1415 Other debt (28%)
  • 1176 I do not know (24%)
  • 1135 Credit card debt (23%)
  • 718 Medical debt (14%)
  • 247 Auto debt (5%)
  • 141 Payday loan debt (3%)
  • 91 Mortgage debt (2%)
  • 40 Private student loan debt (1%)
  • 21 Federal student loan debt (0%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 2680 Attempts to collect debt not owed (54%)
  • 903 Written notification about debt (18%)
  • 506 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (10%)
  • 471 False statements or representation (9%)
  • 347 Communication tactics (7%)
  • 77 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (2%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 1423 Debt is not yours (29%)
  • 775 Debt was result of identity theft (16%)
  • 592 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (12%)
  • 402 Debt was paid (8%)
  • 381 Attempted to collect wrong amount (8%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 585 Complaints: FL
  • 583 Complaints: TX
  • 487 Complaints: CA
  • 404 Complaints: GA
  • 252 Complaints: IL
  • 227 Complaints: PA
  • 210 Complaints: NY
  • 157 Complaints: NJ
  • 143 Complaints: NC
  • 137 Complaints: MI

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

  • 3785 Closed with explanation (76%)
  • 671 In progress (13%)
  • 450 Closed with non-monetary relief (9%)
  • 58 Untimely response (1%)
  • 20 Closed with monetary relief (0%)

This includes 4838 (97%) timely responses to complaints, and 146 (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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