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Yes, It's an FDCPA Violation to Threaten to Harm a Debtor's Children

By Eric Lipman

Please allow me to present Exhibit A from the "Why do debt collectors get a bad rap?" file. From Evan Brown's Internet Cases blog, I learned of the recent opinion in Sohns v. Bramacint, out of the District of Minnesota. Cases in which a plaintiff alleges that a debt collection agency violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act by engaging in one form of harassing conduct or another are a dime a dozen. But an employee of Bramacint LLC seems to have gone the extra mile, aided by modern technology, in an attempt to collect back payments on a car loan. From Internet Cases: The first bad decision was to use a caller-ID spoofer to make it look like the collection call was coming from plaintiff?s mother in law. The next not-smart use of technology was to access plaintiff?s MySpace page, learn that plaintiff had a daughter, and to use that fact to intimidate plaintiff. There was evidence in the record to suggest that the collection agency?s ?investigator? said to plaintiff, after mentioning plaintiff?s ?beautiful daughter,? something to the effect of ?wouldn?t it be terrible if something happened to your kids while the sheriff?s department was taking you away?? Color...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on October 15, 2010 (boomark / email).