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Quick analysis: For the second time in three months, FDCPA and TCPA lawsuit numbers rose (2.8%, 13.4%, respectively) while FCRA dipped (-6.9%) from the previous month. That goes counter to the longer term trends we have been seeing that make a case for the opposite (FCRA up, FDCPA & TCPA down). At least it did until this month, when the weight of FCRA’s decline dragged the YTD number back into negative territory, bringing all three statutes down a bit YTD (FDCPA -4.6%, FCRA -1.0%, TCPA -11.1%).

CFPB complaints were up a bit, 2% over the previous month, but way down YTD at -20.6%.

In other news, putative class actions were typical last month with 24% of FDCPA, 25.6% of TCPA and 4.2% of FCRA lawsuits filed that way.

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

And finally, New York attorney Craig B. Sanders represented more consumers (83) than anyone else last month and also YTD (199). Interestingly, Connecticut attorney Sergei Lemberg (who used to dominate the list most months) came roaring back to the #2 position last month after several years of maintaining a lower profile.

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
May 01, 2019
May 31, 2019		 Apr 01, 2019
Apr 30, 2019		 May 01, 2018
May 31, 2018		 Jan 01, 2019
May 31, 2019		 Jan 01, 2018
May 31, 2018
CFPB  4103 4023 2.0% 4811 -14.7% 19425 24459 -20.6%
FDCPA  853 830 2.8% 797 7.0% 3781 3964 -4.6%
FCRA  407 437 -6.9% 512 -20.5% 1930 1949 -1.0%
TCPA  348 307 13.4% 412 -15.5% 1511 1699 -11.1%

 

Complaint Statistics:

4103 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 1338 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from May 01, 2019 to May 31, 2019.

  • 4103 CFPB Complaints
  • 853 FDCPA, 205 Class Action (24.0%)
  • 348 TCPA, 89 Class Action (25.6%)
  • 407 FCRA, 17 Class Action (4.2%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 1338 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 455, or (34%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 2763 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 175 different US District Court branches.
  • About 846 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 83 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 81 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 48 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 46 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 45 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 37 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 36 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Fort Lauderdale
  • 36 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Central Islip
  • 29 Lawsuits: Indiana Southern District Court – Indianapolis
  • 28 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 83 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 62 Consumers: SERGEI LEMBERG
  • Representing 42 Consumers: DAVID M BARSHAY
  • Representing 30 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 29 Consumers: TAXIARCHIS HATZIDIMITRIADIS
  • Representing 23 Consumers: ANTRANIG N GARIBIAN
  • Representing 22 Consumers: DAVID W HEMMINGER
  • Representing 21 Consumers: DAVID SCOTT KLAIN
  • Representing 19 Consumers: MITCHELL L PASHKIN
  • Representing 18 Consumers: MARK A ELDRIDGE

Statistics Year to Date:
6122 total lawsuits for 2019, including:

  • 3781 FDCPA
  • 1930 FCRA
  • 1511 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2019: 5985 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 199 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 177 Consumers: ANTRANIG N GARIBIAN
  • Representing 153 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 136 Consumers: SERGEI LEMBERG
  • Representing 135 Consumers: TAXIARCHIS HATZIDIMITRIADIS
  • Representing 123 Consumers: DAVID SCOTT KLAIN
  • Representing 118 Consumers: MITCHELL L PASHKIN
  • Representing 102 Consumers: DAVID W HEMMINGER
  • Representing 86 Consumers: DAVID M BARSHAY
  • Representing 84 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN

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

There were 4103 complaints filed against debt collectors from May 01, 2019 to May 31, 2019.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 828

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 1142 Other debt (28%)
  • 940 Credit card debt (23%)
  • 873 I do not know (21%)
  • 701 Medical debt (17%)
  • 141 Payday loan debt (3%)
  • 108 Auto debt (3%)
  • 84 Mortgage debt (2%)
  • 64 Federal student loan debt (2%)
  • 50 Private student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 1991 Attempts to collect debt not owed (49%)
  • 839 Written notification about debt (20%)
  • 419 Communication tactics (10%)
  • 392 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (10%)
  • 357 False statements or representation (9%)
  • 105 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (3%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 950 Debt is not yours (23%)
  • 571 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (14%)
  • 534 Debt was result of identity theft (13%)
  • 421 Debt was paid (10%)
  • 284 Attempted to collect wrong amount (7%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 498 Complaints: TX
  • 497 Complaints: FL
  • 489 Complaints: CA
  • 267 Complaints: GA
  • 217 Complaints: NY
  • 156 Complaints: OH
  • 119 Complaints: NC
  • 113 Complaints: VA
  • 110 Complaints: PA
  • 107 Complaints: IL

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

  • 3145 Closed with explanation (77%)
  • 430 In progress (10%)
  • 382 Closed with non-monetary relief (9%)
  • 118 Untimely response (3%)
  • 28 Closed with monetary relief (1%)

This includes 3940 (96%) timely responses to complaints, and 163 (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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