Comenity Bank Debt Calls to Friends and Relatives TCPA Class Action

According to the complaint for this class action, Comenity Bank “bears the dubious distinction of perhaps being the most abusive robocalling debt collector in the country.” The complaint brings suit not under debt collection laws but primarily under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA).

The class for this action is (1) all persons in the US (2) to whose cell phones (3) Comenity placed a non-emergency telephone call relating to a debt (4) using substantially the same system used to call the plaintiff in this case, (5) between July 2, 2015 and July 2, 2019, (6) where Comenity did not have express consent to call the persons’ cell phones.

The complaint says that Comenity has settled “hundreds” of TCPA lawsuits, but it requires the plaintiffs to sign confidentiality agreements. The complaint says, “This form of abuse is so lucrative that individual settlements can be made without making a significant dent in the profits inherent to the abuse.”

In fact, the complaint says, the bank is “one of the top five companies with the most debt collection complaints in 2017…”

The complaint calls attention to a recent $ 8,475,000 settlement of another TCPA class action against Comenity. That case carved out “wrong numbers” as not being violations of the law. However, this complaint alleges that the calls in this case are not really wrong numbers. 

How so? The complaint says, “Comenity has a corporate policy of repeatedly contacting family and friends of debtors to leave supposedly ‘urgent messages’ for the alleged debtor, using this as a tool to humiliate and embarrass debtors as well as to intentionally cause aggravation and annoyance to their relatives and friends.”

The calls are not urgent at all, the complaint asserts, but simply “garden-variety debt collection calls.” They are intended to “panic” the relatives or friends, leading them to call the alleged debtor and in turn panic them. The alleged debtor is then subject to the embarrassment of being forced to explain That the call was about debt collection. “Ultimately,” the complaint says, “another purpose of this tactic is to make it so that family and friends feel harassed and demand that the alleged debtor resolve the debt to end the embarassment.”

The complaint says, “Comenity is notable for having established an entire department set up to ‘skip trace’ or otherwise track down family members and friends of alleged debtors, just so it can illegally roboblast abusive and deceptive calls to them.”

In this case, Comenity had no prior express written consent to call plaintiff Angela McNeal’s cell phone with an automatic dialing system, nor did it have permission to call other family and friends who had no connection with the bank. These calls may be noted as “wrong numbers” in that they did not turn up the alleged debtor, but the complaint claims that Comenity called exactly the numbers it meant to.

Article Type: Lawsuit
Topic: Consumer
Tags: TCPA, Unsolicited Cell Phone Calls, Use of Automatic-Capable Dialer, Wrong number calls