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Quick analysis: Another mixed bag…

CFPB complaints and TCPA suits are down (-.6% and -23.6% respectively) while FDCPA and FCRA suits are up (+8.5% and +9.3% respectively) for September 2020. Year to date the picture shakes out a little differently, with CFPB complaints and FDCPA suits both down for the year (-3.9% and -15.5% respectively) while FCRA and TCPA suits are both up for the year (+3.8% and -+5.7% respectively).

Soooo…. the muddled messaging from plaintiffs continues. Notable last month… FDCPA had a rare mini-surge of activity, TCPA had an uncommonly large tumble. The clear winner in consumer litigation continues to be the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which has been the most consistently increasingly used consumer statute of the last couple of years.

In other news, putative class actions represented 15.1% of FDCPA, 43% of TCPA and 3.3% of FCRA lawsuits filed last month.

About 33% of all plaintiffs who filed suit last month had filed at least once before.

And finally, we have a first – a bicoastal dominance for the month with New York attorney Edward Y. Kroub (making his debut at the top of our list), tied with California attorney Todd M. Friedman (who hasn’t topped our list in ages) each representing 34 consumers in September. New York’s Craig B. Sanders still has filed the most for the year with 271 consumers represented. That YTD stat excludes attorneys Nicole Rochelle Lewis and Rebecca Evans who crammed hundreds of plaintiffs into a few TCPA lawsuits earlier this year.

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
Sep 01, 2020
Sep 30, 2020		 Aug 01, 2020
Aug 31, 2020		 Sep 01, 2019
Sep 30, 2019		 Jan 01, 2020
Sep 30, 2020		 Jan 01, 2019
Sep 30, 2019
CFPB  4770 4799 -0.6% 7966 -40.1% 47252 49179 -3.9%
FDCPA  577 532 8.5% 640 -9.8% 5392 6383 -15.5%
FCRA  458 419 9.3% 434 5.5% 3883 3742 3.8%
TCPA  172 225 -23.6% 238 -27.7% 2743 2594 5.7%

 

Complaint Statistics:

4770 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 1068 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Sep 01, 2020 to Sep 30, 2020.

  • 4770 CFPB Complaints
  • 577 FDCPA, 87 Class Action (15.1%)
  • 172 TCPA, 74 Class Action (43.0%)
  • 458 FCRA, 15 Class Action (3.3%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 1068 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 352, or (33%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 2459 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 160 different US District Court branches.
  • About 734 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 65 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 47 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 42 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 42 Lawsuits: Indiana Southern District Court – Indianapolis
  • 39 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 36 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 31 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 31 Lawsuits: New Jersey District Court – Newark
  • 26 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Fort Lauderdale
  • 24 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 34 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN
  • Representing 34 Consumers: EDWARD Y KROUB
  • Representing 29 Consumers: JOSHUA P WARD
  • Representing 26 Consumers: ADRIAN ROBERT BACON
  • Representing 20 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 19 Consumers: JOHN THOMAS STEINKAMP
  • Representing 18 Consumers: DAVID J PHILIPPS
  • Representing 17 Consumers: YOSEF STEINMETZ
  • Representing 17 Consumers: LARRY PAUL SMITH
  • Representing 16 Consumers: DAVID M MARCO

Statistics Year to Date:
9893 total lawsuits for 2020, including:

  • 5392 FDCPA
  • 3883 FCRA
  • 2743 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2020: 9917 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 361 Consumers: REBECCA EVANS
  • Representing 271 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 238 Consumers: NICOLE ROCHELLE LEWIS
  • Representing 221 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN
  • Representing 192 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 184 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 176 Consumers: ADRIAN ROBERT BACON
  • Representing 167 Consumers: EDWARD Y KROUB
  • Representing 155 Consumers: MICHAEL ZHANG
  • Representing 136 Consumers: JOSEPH SCOTT DAVIDSON

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

There were 4770 complaints filed against debt collectors from Sep 01, 2020 to Sep 30, 2020.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 773

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 1304 Credit card debt (27%)
  • 1246 Other debt (26%)
  • 1062 I do not know (22%)
  • 695 Medical debt (15%)
  • 205 Auto debt (4%)
  • 124 Payday loan debt (3%)
  • 68 Mortgage debt (1%)
  • 34 Federal student loan debt (1%)
  • 32 Private student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 2562 Attempts to collect debt not owed (54%)
  • 1101 Written notification about debt (23%)
  • 352 False statements or representation (7%)
  • 350 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (7%)
  • 324 Communication tactics (7%)
  • 81 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (2%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 1206 Debt is not yours (25%)
  • 851 Debt was result of identity theft (18%)
  • 849 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (18%)
  • 438 Debt was paid (9%)
  • 300 Attempted to collect wrong amount (6%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 649 Complaints: TX
  • 475 Complaints:
  • 468 Complaints: CA
  • 455 Complaints: FL
  • 329 Complaints: GA
  • 304 Complaints: NY
  • 127 Complaints: PA
  • 112 Complaints: OH
  • 110 Complaints: NC
  • 104 Complaints: MA

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

  • 3946 Closed with explanation (83%)
  • 396 Closed with non-monetary relief (8%)
  • 322 In progress (7%)
  • 86 Untimely response (2%)
  • 20 Closed with monetary relief (0%)

This includes 4605 (97%) timely responses to complaints, and 165 (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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