In March, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss a claim that the defendant violated § 1692e(8) of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) when it failed to report a debt as disputed. Specifically, the court determined it could disregard the allegations in the complaint that the plaintiff had disputed the debt during a telephone call, because the defendant attached the transcript of the call to the motion to dismiss that contradicted the plaintiff’s allegations.
In Green v. LVNV Funding, LLC, the plaintiff filed a lawsuit based on a telephone call she made to the defendant during which she claimed she disputed the debt. She further alleged that after receiving the call, the defendant did not report the debt as disputed to the consumer reporting agencies (CRAs). The plaintiff claimed this violated § 1692e(8) of the FDCPA, which prohibits debt collectors from reporting disputed debts to CRAs without disclosing the dispute.
The court noted that the plaintiff “[h]inges her entire claim on a December 11, 2023 phone call, during which she purportedly challenged the accuracy of the relevant debt.” However, the defendant attached a transcript of the call to the motion to dismiss, which the court found it could consider because the transcript qualified as a “document[] integral to or explicitly relied upon by the complaint,” and the defendant attached the “undisputedly authentic document.” Reviewing the transcript, the court determined that the plaintiff “did not — in any sense of the word — dispute the debt. Rather, [the plaintiff] merely asked how the debt had been calculated.”
Because the plaintiff had not “disputed” the debt as contemplated by § 1692e(8), the court granted the defendant’s motion to dismiss.
