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Quick analysis: Well, 2020 ended pretty much as it ran throughout the year. FDCPA suits were down fairly dramatically from 2019 at -17.6%, TCPA was down more nominally at -3.3%, but it was actually more dramatic than that due to some early-year suits that distorted the numbers, and FCRA ended up +5.3% – the only consumer statute that is still consistently showing year-over-year growth.

Here are some year-over-year trends for FDCPA, TCPA and FCRA suits, as well as CFPB and BBB complaints.

 

*A note on BBB complaints – they are not all in for 2020 yet, so consider that number incomplete. BBB numbers keep trickling in for up to six months so it will be a while before we can be confident about where it settles, but expect that number to rise by as many as 20k.

In spite of those full-year numbers, all three of the consumer statutes (FDCPA, TCPA and FCRA) were up fairly significantly over the previous month, ranging from +16.7% for FCRA to +11.3 for FDCPA and +3.7% for TCPA.

CFPB complaints against debt collectors fell slightly in December from November (-2.6%), yet finished the year up a healthy 16.2% over 2019.

In other news, putative class actions represented 19.3% of FDCPA, 47.4% of TCPA and 2.5% of FCRA lawsuits filed last month.

About 32% of all plaintiffs who filed suit last month had filed at least once before.

And finally, California attorney Todd M. Friedman stays at the top of the list representing more consumers than anyone else in the month with 51 and Mr. Friedman also edges out New York’s Craig B. Sanders to take the title for having filed the most of the year with 320. That YTD stat excludes attorneys Nicole Rochelle Lewis and Rebecca Evans who crammed hundreds of plaintiffs into a few TCPA lawsuits early in 2021.

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
Dec 01, 2020
Dec 31, 2020		 Nov 01, 2020
Nov 30, 2020		 Dec 01, 2019
Dec 31, 2019		 Jan 01, 2020
Dec 31, 2020		 Jan 01, 2019
Dec 31, 2019
CFPB  4589 4712 -2.6% 3324 38.1% 53898 46393 16.2%
FDCPA  493 443 11.3% 644 -23.4% 6876 8343 -17.6%
FCRA  447 383 16.7% 377 18.6% 5223 4960 5.3%
TCPA  194 187 3.7% 253 -23.3% 3302 3416 -3.3%

 

Complaint Statistics:

4589 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 1057 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Dec 01, 2020 to Dec 31, 2020.

  • 4589 CFPB Complaints
  • 493 FDCPA, 95 Class Action (19.3%)
  • 194 TCPA, 92 Class Action (47.4%)
  • 447 FCRA, 11 Class Action (2.5%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 1057 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 334, or (32%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 4649 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 152 different US District Court branches.
  • About 702 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 67 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 61 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 43 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 42 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 31 Lawsuits: New Jersey District Court – Newark
  • 27 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 27 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 26 Lawsuits: New York Southern District Court – Foley Square
  • 25 Lawsuits: New Jersey District Court – Trenton
  • 23 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 51 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN
  • Representing 43 Consumers: ADRIAN ROBERT BACON
  • Representing 31 Consumers: EDWARD Y KROUB
  • Representing 22 Consumers: MOSHE O BOROOSAN
  • Representing 21 Consumers: YOSEF STEINMETZ
  • Representing 20 Consumers: JOSHUA P WARD
  • Representing 19 Consumers: KENNY G OH
  • Representing 17 Consumers: MISTY OAKS PAXTON
  • Representing 17 Consumers: KYLE W SCHUMACHER
  • Representing 14 Consumers: ALEJANDRO EMMANUEL FIGUEROA

Statistics Year to Date:
12963 total lawsuits for 2020, including:

  • 6876 FDCPA
  • 5223 FCRA
  • 3302 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2020: 12582 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 361 Consumers: REBECCA EVANS
  • Representing 320 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN
  • Representing 294 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 254 Consumers: ADRIAN ROBERT BACON
  • Representing 238 Consumers: NICOLE ROCHELLE LEWIS
  • Representing 231 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 225 Consumers: EDWARD Y KROUB
  • Representing 208 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 167 Consumers: DAVID J PHILIPPS
  • Representing 166 Consumers: ALEJANDRO EMMANUEL FIGUEROA

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

There were 4589 complaints filed against debt collectors from Dec 01, 2020 to Dec 31, 2020.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 744

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 1203 I do not know (26%)
  • 1159 Other debt (25%)
  • 1147 Credit card debt (25%)
  • 671 Medical debt (15%)
  • 175 Auto debt (4%)
  • 107 Payday loan debt (2%)
  • 67 Mortgage debt (1%)
  • 34 Federal student loan debt (1%)
  • 26 Private student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 2397 Attempts to collect debt not owed (52%)
  • 1195 Written notification about debt (26%)
  • 333 False statements or representation (7%)
  • 316 Communication tactics (7%)
  • 299 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (7%)
  • 49 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (1%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 1320 Debt is not yours (29%)
  • 882 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (19%)
  • 642 Debt was result of identity theft (14%)
  • 373 Debt was paid (8%)
  • 289 Didnt receive notice of right to dispute (6%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 624 Complaints: TX
  • 436 Complaints: FL
  • 428 Complaints: CA
  • 349 Complaints: GA
  • 342 Complaints: NY
  • 221 Complaints: MA
  • 186 Complaints: NJ
  • 180 Complaints: PA
  • 130 Complaints: IL
  • 121 Complaints: NC

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

  • 3747 Closed with explanation (82%)
  • 378 Closed with non-monetary relief (8%)
  • 376 In progress (8%)
  • 65 Untimely response (1%)
  • 23 Closed with monetary relief (1%)

This includes 4438 (97%) timely responses to complaints, and 151 (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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