By Andrew A. Turner, J.D.
Cases in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois asking whether the display of a debtor’s account number through the glassine window of an envelope violates the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act have met with differing results.
On March 17, 2015, Judge Shadur said that such a complaint could only be viewed as a “bad joke,” given that it’s “claims are so patently absurd”(Sampson v. MRS BPO, LLC). But in a Sept. 30, 2015 opinion, Judge Gottschall refused to dismiss such a complaint, saying that the disclosure of an account number is a disclosure of a debtor’s private information that cannot be ignored (Adkins v. Financial Recovery Services, Inc.).
In the earlier case, Judge Shadur said that a string of incomprehensible numbers and symbols on the outside of the envelope could not be viewed as an unfair and abusive debt collection practice that the statute could be invoked to protect against.
On the other hand, Judge Gottschall concluded that disclosure of a collection account number on the outside of an envelope runs afoul of statutory requirements prohibiting the display of language or symbols on a debt collection letter envelope except the debt collector’s address and, in limited cases, business name. Saying that the disclosure was not clearly benign, the district judge refused to ignore the “unequivocal language of the statute” in the latter case.
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