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Quick analysis: What goes up…

… must come down. FDCPA, TCPA and FCRA are all down, fairly significantly, from last month. But, before anyone gets too excited… they are all still up, fairly significantly, year-to-date.

FDCPA is down 12.5% for the month, but up 14% for the year.
TCPA is down 42% for the month, but up 11.4% for the year.
FCRA is down 8.8% for the month, but up 42.9% for the year.

CFPB complaints are down as well (20.8%), but with the usual caveat that the numbers are relatively meaningless until the full month’s data finishes trickling in. Overall, even with this month’s incomplete data, CFPB complaints are up 1.7% over this time last year. Look for those numbers to move closer together over the next month.

Next month, in addition to December statistics, we will be publishing our year in review.

Fun Facts:

  • For November 2015, about 36% of all consumer litigation plaintiffs had sued at least once before under consumer litigation statutes.
  • About 815 different companies were sued, and 696 different debt collectors were complained about to the CFPB.
  • Class actions were mixed, with 18.7% for FDCPA, 8.2% for TCPA and 16.5% for FCRA.
  • The Illinois Northern District Court in Chicago once again had the most litigation filed in it, with 70 consumers represented in litigation there. California had the most CFPB complaints against debt collectors, with 336.
  • Attorney Craig Sanders represented the most consumers for the month (by far) with 45, and the most year to date, with 297.
Comparisons: Current Period: Previous Period: Previous Year Comp:
Nov 01, 2015
Nov 30, 2015		 Oct 01, 2015
Oct 31, 2015		 Nov 01, 2014
Nov 30, 2014
CFPB Complaints  2399 3030 -20.8% 2860 -16.1%
FDCPA lawsuits  807 922 -12.5% 770 4.8%
FCRA lawsuits  352 386 -8.8% 189 86.2%
TCPA lawsuits  182 314 -42.0% 116 56.9%
YTD CFPB Complaints  36998 36372 1.7%
YTD FDCPA lawsuits  10468 9180 14.0%
YTD FCRA lawsuits  3178 2224 42.9%
YTD TCPA lawsuits  2590 2324 11.4%

Complaint Statistics:

2399 consumers filed CFPB complaints against debt collectors and about 1075 consumers filed lawsuits under consumer statutes from Nov 01, 2015 to Nov 30, 2015. Here is an approximate breakdown:

  • 2399 CFPB Complaints
  • 807 FDCPA, 151 Class Action (18.7%)
  • 182 TCPA, 15 Class Action (8.2%)
  • 352 FCRA, 58 Class Action (16.5%)

Litigation Summary (scroll down for CFPB data):

  • Of those cases, there were about 1075 unique plaintiffs (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit).
  • Of those plaintiffs, about 390, or (36%), had sued under consumer statutes before.
  • Combined, those plaintiffs have filed about 1646 lawsuits since 2001
  • Actions were filed in 154 different US District Court branches.
  • About 815 different collection firms and creditors were sued.

The top courts where lawsuits were filed:

  • 70 Lawsuits: Illinois Northern District Court – Chicago
  • 61 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Brooklyn
  • 49 Lawsuits: California Central District Court – Los Angeles
  • 42 Lawsuits: Pennsylvania Eastern District Court – Philadelphia
  • 36 Lawsuits: California Southern District Court – San Diego
  • 32 Lawsuits: Nevada District Court – Las Vegas
  • 30 Lawsuits: Georgia Northern District Court – Atlanta
  • 30 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Tampa
  • 29 Lawsuits: New York Eastern District Court – Central Islip
  • 25 Lawsuits: Florida Middle District Court – Orlando

The most active consumer attorneys were:

  • Representing 45 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 27 Consumers: DAVID H KRIEGER
  • Representing 26 Consumers: JAMES A FRANCIS
  • Representing 23 Consumers: MATTHEW THOMAS BERRY
  • Representing 22 Consumers: PAUL JONATHAN SIEG
  • Representing 20 Consumers: ADAM JON FISHBEIN
  • Representing 20 Consumers: MOHAMMED OMAR BADWAN
  • Representing 19 Consumers: AHMAD TAYSEER SULAIMAN
  • Representing 15 Consumers: MARK D MAILMAN
  • Representing 14 Consumers: SCOTT MATTHEW JOHNSON

Statistics Year to Date:
13320 total lawsuits for 2015, including:

  • 10468 FDCPA
  • 3178 FCRA
  • 2590 TCPA

Number of Unique Plaintiffs for 2015: 12427 (including multiple plaintiffs in one suit)

The most active consumer attorneys of the year:

  • Representing 297 Consumers: CRAIG B SANDERS
  • Representing 212 Consumers: SERGEI LEMBERG
  • Representing 192 Consumers: DAVID H KRIEGER
  • Representing 184 Consumers: MOHAMMED OMAR BADWAN
  • Representing 179 Consumers: CRAIG THOR KIMMEL
  • Representing 172 Consumers: TODD M FRIEDMAN
  • Representing 170 Consumers: DANIEL A EDELMAN
  • Representing 170 Consumers: AMY LYNN BENNECOFF GINSBURG
  • Representing 168 Consumers: ADAM JON FISHBEIN
  • Representing 168 Consumers: AHMAD TAYSEER SULAIMAN

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

There were 2399 complaints filed against debt collectors from Nov 01, 2015 to Nov 30, 2015.

Total number of debt collectors complained about: 696

The types of debt behind the complaints were:

  • 719 Other (phone, health club, etc.) (30%)
  • 507 Credit card (21%)
  • 484 Unknown (20%)
  • 358 Medical (15%)
  • 132 Payday loan (6%)
  • 67 Mortgage (3%)
  • 56 Auto (2%)
  • 42 Non-federal student loan (2%)
  • 34 Federal student loan (1%)

Here is a breakdown of complaints:

  • 1014 Cont’d attempts collect debt not owed (42%)
  • 441 Disclosure verification of debt (18%)
  • 402 Communication tactics (17%)
  • 226 False statements or representation (9%)
  • 160 Improper contact or sharing of info (7%)
  • 156 Taking/threatening an illegal action (7%)

The top five subissues were:

  • 604 Debt is not mine (25%)
  • 298 Not given enough info to verify debt (12%)
  • 275 Debt was paid (11%)
  • 246 Frequent or repeated calls (10%)
  • 182 Attempted to collect wrong amount (8%)

The top states complaints were filed from are:

  • 336 Complaints: CA
  • 286 Complaints: TX
  • 221 Complaints: FL
  • 132 Complaints: NY
  • 110 Complaints: GA
  • 94 Complaints: IL
  • 79 Complaints: PA
  • 79 Complaints: MD
  • 77 Complaints: VA
  • 74 Complaints: OH

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

  • 2399 (100%)

This includes 2188 (91%) timely responses to complaints, and 211 (9%) untimely responses.

Of the company responses, consumers accepted 0 (%) of them, disputed 233 (10%) of them, and 2166 (90%) were N\A.

The top five days for complaints were:

  • 161 Complaints: Thu, 11/05/2015
  • 149 Complaints: Mon, 11/09/2015
  • 134 Complaints: Thu, 11/12/2015
  • 122 Complaints: Thu, 11/19/2015
  • 116 Complaints: Wed, 11/04/2015

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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