Start a Free Trial

Quick analysis: Last Month Was So Last Month.

In August, all of the rows were green, meaning CFPB complaints, TCPA, FDCPA and FCRA lawsuits were all up over July.

However, in September all of the rows are red, meaning, well you know. Everything went boom in comparison to August. And all by double-digits, except for FCRA which “only” dropped by -6.4%. CFPB complaints fell -11.1%, FDCPA fell -18% and TCPA was down -20.2% for the month.

Most are down YTD as well, again except for FCRA which is still up YTD by +5.6%. CFPB complaints are down YTD -16.6%, FDCPA is down -27.3% and TCPA is down -16.7% for the year.

In other news, putative class actions represented 9.2% of FDCPA, 47% of TCPA and 1.9% of FCRA lawsuits filed last month. About 46% of all plaintiffs who filed suit last month had filed at least once before. And finally, Minnesota attorney Catrina Eom Smith makes her debut at the top of this list for representing the most consumers in August (38) while Florida attorney Jibrael S Hindi has still represented the most consumers for the year so far (229).

Current Month: Previous Month: Previous
Year:		 Year to Date: Year to
Date Comp:
Sep 01, 2022
Sep 30, 2022		 Aug 01, 2022
Aug 31, 2022		 Sep 01, 2021
Sep 30, 2021		 Jan 01, 2022
Sep 30, 2022		 Jan 01, 2021
Sep 30, 2021
CFPB  4479 5040 -11.1% 6022 -25.6% 46210 55400 -16.6%
FDCPA  305 372 -18.0% 533 -42.8% 3664 5043 -27.3%
FCRA  465 497 -6.4% 392 18.6% 4295 4066 5.6%
TCPA  134 168 -20.2% 112 19.6% 1162 1395 -16.7%

 

Complaint Statistics:

4479 consumers filed CFPB complaints, and about 804 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Sep 01, 2022 to Sep 30, 2022.

  • 4479 CFPB Complaints
  • 305 FDCPA, 28 Class Action (9.2%)
  • 134 TCPA, 63 Class Action (47.0%)
  • 465 FCRA, 9 Class Action (1.9%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 804 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 368, or (46%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 2257 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 145 different US District Court branches.
  • About 594 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 69 Lawsuits: Minnesota District Court – Dmn
  • 53 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 39 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 37 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Western Division – Los Angeles
  • 30 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 27 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 21 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Fort Lauderdale
  • 21 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas
  • 20 Lawsuits: Florida Southern District Court – Miami
  • 19 Lawsuits: Texas Southern District Court – Houston

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 38 Consumers: CATRINA EOM SMITH
  • Representing 16 Consumers: TIMOTHY S ANDERSON
  • Representing 13 Consumers: MICHAEL FREDERICK CARDOZA
  • Representing 13 Consumers: SYED HASEEB HUSSAIN
  • Representing 13 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM
  • Representing 12 Consumers: GEORGE HAINES
  • Representing 12 Consumers: DAVID J PHILIPPS
  • Representing 11 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 11 Consumers: GERARDO AVALOS
  • Representing 11 Consumers: YITZCHAK ZELMAN

Statistics Year to Date:
8372 total lawsuits for 2022, including:

  • 3664 FDCPA
  • 4295 FCRA
  • 1162 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2022: 7488 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 197 Consumers: THOMAS JOHN PATTI
  • Representing 190 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 140 Consumers: JIBRAEL JARALLAH SAID HINDI
  • Representing 135 Consumers: CRAIG CARLEY MARCHIANDO
  • Representing 129 Consumers: LEONARD ANTHONY BENNETT
  • Representing 119 Consumers: MICHAEL FREDERICK CARDOZA
  • Representing 117 Consumers: DREW DAVID SARRETT
  • Representing 115 Consumers: CHRISTOPHER NEIL ARMOR
  • Representing 112 Consumers: SYED HASEEB HUSSAIN
  • Representing 98 Consumers: NATHAN CHARLES VOLHEIM

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

There were 4479 complaints filed against debt collectors from Sep 01, 2022 to Sep 30, 2022.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 754

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 1343 Other debt (30%)
  • 1058 Credit card debt (24%)
  • 896 I do not know (20%)
  • 701 Medical debt (16%)
  • 268 Auto debt (6%)
  • 79 Payday loan debt (2%)
  • 78 Mortgage debt (2%)
  • 30 Federal student loan debt (1%)
  • 26 Private student loan debt (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 2345 Attempts to collect debt not owed (52%)
  • 826 Written notification about debt (18%)
  • 453 Took or threatened to take negative or legal action (10%)
  • 444 False statements or representation (10%)
  • 349 Communication tactics (8%)
  • 62 Threatened to contact someone or share information improperly (1%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 1142 Debt is not yours (25%)
  • 724 Debt was result of identity theft (16%)
  • 543 Didnt receive enough information to verify debt (12%)
  • 409 Debt was paid (9%)
  • 366 Attempted to collect wrong amount (8%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 574 Complaints: TX
  • 531 Complaints: FL
  • 471 Complaints: CA
  • 364 Complaints: GA
  • 205 Complaints: NY
  • 175 Complaints: NC
  • 173 Complaints: IL
  • 146 Complaints: PA
  • 137 Complaints: NJ
  • 121 Complaints: VA

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

  • 3374 Closed with explanation (75%)
  • 644 In progress (14%)
  • 388 Closed with non-monetary relief (9%)
  • 54 Untimely response (1%)
  • 19 Closed with monetary relief (0%)

This includes 4366 (97%) timely responses to complaints, and 113 (3%) untimely responses.

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. 

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.