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Quick analysis: WebRecon Stats for June 2017: Mostly Downward Movement, But Not Really…

Quick analysis: After a very robust May, June tells a different story with CFPB complaints down 26.1%, FDCPA complaints down 7.8%, TCPA complaints down 11.3% and FCRA complaints up 2.4%.

But… CFPB complaints are still up 21.7% year-to-date (YTD), TCPA complaints are still up 3.8% YTD and FCRA complaints are up 6.2% YTD. Only FDCPA suits are down at 3% YTD.

“Moral of the story… there is very little comprehensible pattern to be discerned, beyond the fact that the overarching pattern seems to be pretty steady in spite of the monthly ups and downs” said WebRecon CEO Jack Gordon.

Here are some raw numbers for the first six months of 2017: 7865 unique consumer plaintiffs filed 5230 FDCPA, 2494 TCPA and 2115 FCRA lawsuit actions against debt collectors and creditors.

Putative class actions were relatively stable last month with 19.1% of FDCPA, 12.0% of TCPA and 11.9% of FCRA lawsuits filed that way.

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

And finally, Florida attorney Christopher W Boss took the crown for representing the most consumer plaintiffs (74) in June (all in ONE lawsuit!), and New York attorney Craig B Sanders keeps the crown for representing the most consumers year-to-date (314).

Comparisons: Current Period: Previous Period: Previous Year Comp:
Jun 01, 2017
Jun 30, 2017		 May 01, 2017
May 31, 2017		 Jun 01, 2016
Jun 30, 2016
CFPB Complaints  3033 4102 -26.1% 3281 -7.6%
FDCPA lawsuits  894 970 -7.8% 958 -6.7%
FCRA lawsuits  386 377 2.4% 415 -7.0%
TCPA lawsuits  449 506 -11.3% 389 15.4%
YTD CFPB Complaints  23722 19488 21.7%
YTD FDCPA lawsuits  5257 5419 -3.0%
YTD FCRA lawsuits  2117 1993 6.2%
YTD TCPA lawsuits  2515 2422 3.8%

 

Complaint Statistics:

3033 consumers filed CFPB complaints against debt collectors and about 1477 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Jun 01, 2017 to Jun 30, 2017. Here is an approximate breakdown:

  • 3033 CFPB Complaints
  • 894 FDCPA, 171 Class Action (19.1%)
  • 449 TCPA, 54 Class Action (12.0%)
  • 386 FCRA, 46 Class Action (11.9%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 1477 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 472, or (32%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 2104 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 178 different US District Court branches.
  • About 826 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 118 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 80 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Central Islip
  • 66 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 63 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 53 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 42 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 42 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas
  • 41 Lawsuits: California Southern District Court – San Diego
  • 27 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 25 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Fort Lauderdale

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 74 Consumers: CHRISTOPHER W BOSS
  • Representing 57 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 47 Consumers: AHMAD TAYSEER SULAIMAN
  • Representing 46 Consumers: MOHAMMED OMAR BADWAN
  • Representing 42 Consumers: WILLIAM CRAFT HUGHES
  • Representing 32 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 30 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 29 Consumers: TAXIARCHIS HATZIDIMITRIADIS
  • Representing 25 Consumers: MICHAEL JACOB WOOD
  • Representing 25 Consumers: CELETHA CHATMAN

Statistics Year to Date:
8139 total lawsuits for 2017, including:

  • 5257 FDCPA
  • 2117 FCRA
  • 2515 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2017: 7893 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 314 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 248 Consumers: AHMAD TAYSEER SULAIMAN
  • Representing 213 Consumers: MOHAMMED OMAR BADWAN
  • Representing 203 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN
  • Representing 201 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 195 Consumers: DAVID H KRIEGER
  • Representing 190 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 156 Consumers: TAXIARCHIS HATZIDIMITRIADIS
  • Representing 136 Consumers: ADRIAN ROBERT BACON
  • Representing 124 Consumers: PAUL JONATHAN SIEG

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

There were 3033 complaints filed against debt collectors from Jun 01, 2017 to Jun 30, 2017.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 739

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 919 Other debt (30%)
  • 584 Credit card debt (19%)
  • 568 Medical debt (19%)
  • 557 I do not know (18%)
  • 108 Mortgage debt (4%)
  • 107 Payday loan debt (4%)
  • 85 Auto debt (3%)
  • 60 Private student loan debt (2%)
  • 45 Federal student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 1305 Attempts to collect debt not owed (43%)
  • 708 Written notification about debt (23%)
  • 348 Communication tactics (11%)
  • 325 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (11%)
  • 271 False statements or representation (9%)
  • 76 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (3%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 680 Debt is not yours (22%)
  • 505 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (17%)
  • 364 Debt was paid (12%)
  • 224 Attempted to collect wrong amount (7%)
  • 171 Debt was result of identity theft (6%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 389 Complaints: TX
  • 352 Complaints: CA
  • 307 Complaints: FL
  • 217 Complaints: GA
  • 159 Complaints: NY
  • 145 Complaints:
  • 109 Complaints: NJ
  • 92 Complaints: IL
  • 87 Complaints: PA
  • 84 Complaints: NC

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

  • 3033 (100%)

This includes 2884 (95%) timely responses to complaints, and 149 (5%) untimely responses.

Of the company responses, consumers accepted (%) of them, disputed (%) of them, and (%) were N\A.

The top five days for complaints were:

  • 181 Complaints: Tue, 06/06/2017
  • 180 Complaints: Fri, 06/09/2017
  • 162 Complaints: Tue, 06/20/2017
  • 159 Complaints: Thu, 06/01/2017
  • 148 Complaints: Wed, 06/14/2017

 

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

© WebRecon LLC. All Rights Reserved.

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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