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In Smith v. Patenaude & Felix, plaintiff alleged that defendant violated the FDCPA and FCRA by pulling her credit report without a permissible purpose because defendant knew, or should have known, that plaintiff was not the debtor.  Defendant moved to dismiss, arguing that the debt collection attempts provided a permissible purpose for obtaining the credit report.  The court denied the motion, finding that the allegation that plaintiff was not the debtor, and was not involved in initiating the transaction that resulted in the debt, was sufficient to state a claim for an unlawful credit pull.

In Tschudin v. Brumbaugh & Quandahl, plaintiff alleged that defendant violated the FDCPA by filing a collection lawsuit that included exhibits containing plaintiff’s account number, date of birth and social security number.  Defendant moved to dismiss, arguing that the mistaken failure to redact the information was inadvertent, and could not be considered an unfair or abusive collection practice.  The court agreed and dismissed the FDCPA claim, concluding that the FDCPA does not create a cause of action for filing a relevant document that was not properly redacted.

In Grace v. LVNV Funding, plaintiff alleged that defendant violated the FDCPA by adding an 18% “service charge”, which was alleged to be a disguised interest charge not authorized by state law or the underlying agreement.  Defendant moved for summary judgment, arguing that the charge was not interest, but a passable service charge.  The court rejected that argument, finding that the charge was a disguised interest charge being collected at an unlawful rate.

In Norman v. Complete Payment Recovery, plaintiff alleged that defendant violated the TCPA by placing robocalls to his cell phone without consent.  Defendant moved for summary judgment, arguing that the calls were not made with an “automatic telephone dialing system” as defined by the TCPA because the calls were manually dialed on equipment lacking any automated or predictive dialing capacity.  The court denied the motion, finding that there was a disputed factual issue on the manner used to make the calls because plaintiff  testified that he heard a non-human, automated voice when he answered some of the calls.