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Quick analysis: Litigation for June 2019 followed a now-familiar path, with FDCPA and TCPA dipping significantly down from the previous month (-29.2% and -26.4% respectively) while FCRA increased +8.4%. Year-to-date shows the same trends, but more moderated with FDCPA -7.5%, FCRA +2% and TCPA -12.7%.

CFPB complaints are also showing a dip, down -2.5% from the previous month and -18.1 YTD.

In other news, putative class actions were a little high last month with 19% of FDCPA, 32.8% of TCPA and 4.5% of FCRA lawsuits filed that way.

About 34% of all plaintiffs who filed suit last month had filed at least once before.

And finally, Connecticut attorney Sergei Lemberg continued his resurgence into the top spot, representing more consumers (45) than anyone else last month. New York attorney Craig B. Sanders is still at the top of the list YTD with 225 consumers represented.

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
Jun 01, 2019
Jun 30, 2019		 May 01, 2019
May 31, 2019		 Jun 01, 2018
Jun 30, 2018		 Jan 01, 2019
Jun 30, 2019		 Jan 01, 2018
Jun 30, 2018
CFPB  4070 4176 -2.5% 4326 -5.9% 23578 28785 -18.1%
FDCPA  605 854 -29.2% 778 -22.2% 4387 4742 -7.5%
FCRA  441 407 8.4% 375 17.6% 2371 2324 2.0%
TCPA  256 348 -26.4% 326 -21.5% 1767 2025 -12.7%

 

Complaint Statistics:

4070 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 1195 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Jun 01, 2019 to Jun 30, 2019.

  • 4070 CFPB Complaints
  • 605 FDCPA, 115 Class Action (19.0%)
  • 256 TCPA, 84 Class Action (32.8%)
  • 441 FCRA, 20 Class Action (4.5%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 1195 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 403, or (34%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 2867 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 161 different US District Court branches.
  • About 768 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 71 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 46 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 44 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 44 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 37 Lawsuits: Delaware District Court – Wilmington
  • 36 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 35 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Fort Lauderdale
  • 33 Lawsuits: Indiana Southern District Court – Indianapolis
  • 30 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas
  • 30 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 45 Consumers: SERGEI LEMBERG
  • Representing 35 Consumers: ANTRANIG N GARIBIAN
  • Representing 30 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 29 Consumers: DAVID W HEMMINGER
  • Representing 26 Consumers: TAXIARCHIS HATZIDIMITRIADIS
  • Representing 26 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 22 Consumers: DAVID M BARSHAY
  • Representing 20 Consumers: DAVID H KRIEGER
  • Representing 16 Consumers: JIBRAEL JARALLAH SAID HINDI
  • Representing 15 Consumers: ANDREW JOHN SHAMIS

Statistics Year to Date:
7258 total lawsuits for 2019, including:

  • 4387 FDCPA
  • 2371 FCRA
  • 1767 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2019: 7065 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 225 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 212 Consumers: ANTRANIG N GARIBIAN
  • Representing 183 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 181 Consumers: SERGEI LEMBERG
  • Representing 161 Consumers: TAXIARCHIS HATZIDIMITRIADIS
  • Representing 131 Consumers: DAVID W HEMMINGER
  • Representing 128 Consumers: DAVID SCOTT KLAIN
  • Representing 126 Consumers: MITCHELL L PASHKIN
  • Representing 108 Consumers: DAVID M BARSHAY
  • Representing 99 Consumers: DAVID H KRIEGER

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

There were 4070 complaints filed against debt collectors from Jun 01, 2019 to Jun 30, 2019.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 785

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 1073 Other debt (26%)
  • 1014 Credit card debt (25%)
  • 864 I do not know (21%)
  • 656 Medical debt (16%)
  • 143 Auto debt (4%)
  • 114 Payday loan debt (3%)
  • 86 Mortgage debt (2%)
  • 64 Federal student loan debt (2%)
  • 56 Private student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 2038 Attempts to collect debt not owed (50%)
  • 767 Written notification about debt (19%)
  • 437 Communication tactics (11%)
  • 375 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (9%)
  • 337 False statements or representation (8%)
  • 116 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (3%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 969 Debt is not yours (24%)
  • 613 Debt was result of identity theft (15%)
  • 539 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (13%)
  • 388 Debt was paid (10%)
  • 271 Attempted to collect wrong amount (7%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 592 Complaints: TX
  • 465 Complaints: CA
  • 443 Complaints: FL
  • 279 Complaints: GA
  • 172 Complaints: NY
  • 147 Complaints: OH
  • 130 Complaints: NJ
  • 126 Complaints: AZ
  • 121 Complaints: PA
  • 118 Complaints: NC

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

  • 3157 Closed with explanation (78%)
  • 420 In progress (10%)
  • 375 Closed with non-monetary relief (9%)
  • 96 Untimely response (2%)
  • 22 Closed with monetary relief (1%)

This includes 3901 (96%) timely responses to complaints, and 169 (4%) 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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