District Court says “state of confusion” not an injury under the FDCPA

Courts Class Action Debt Collection Appellate Seventh Circuit

On April 26, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois granted a defendant debt collector’s request for summary judgment and vacated a class certification order following recent decisions issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in which the appellate court held that “the state of confusion is not itself an injury.” The court’s order reversed an earlier ruling that granted class certification and partial summary judgment in favor of a class of Illinois consumers who alleged that the defendant sent misleading or confusing dunning letters that violated the FDCPA by incorrectly identifying the name of the creditor. However, after reconsidering several 7th Circuit holdings (see InfoBytes coverage of Pennell v. Global Trust Management, LLC here), the court concluded that in the absence of any evidence showing that the plaintiff suffered a concrete injury, the plaintiff lacked standing to bring his FDCPA claims. Specifically, the court held that the plaintiff failed to claim that his confusion led him to take any actions to his detriment. Being merely confused is not a concrete injury, the court ruled, emphasizing that the plaintiff “needed to do more than demonstrate a threat that he would fail to exercise his rights because he deemed the letter a scam—he must have actually failed to exercise those rights and suffered some tangible adverse consequence as a result.”