Chicago Business Litigation Lawyer Blog

In a long-running consumer privacy violation case, the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has denied damages to a group of homeowners whose mortgage company sold their information to telemarketers. In Mirfasihi v. Fleet Mortgage , No. 07-3402 (7th Cir. Dec. 30, 2008), Fleet Mortgage Company sold information on 1.6 million clients to telemarketers, without those clients' permission. Two nationwide classes were certified: a class of people who bought products from the telemarketers (who used deceptive practices in their sales) and a class of people who merely had their information shared. This appeal comes from the latter group, some of whose members objected to a proposed settlement that gave them no damages.

In its analysis, written by Judge Posner, the court started by agreeing with the appellants that their claims may have some value under state consumer protection laws, despite the trial court's conclusion that they did not. Many state statutes allow statutory damages even when no actual harm is present. However, the majority wrote, the information-sharing class had no claim in a class action -- only in individual actions. And no individual plaintiff has demonstrated a willingness to sue for the "modest statutory damages" available under state laws, despite eight years of litigation and two prior appeals to the Seventh Circuit, the judge wrote.

The court turned next to the objectors' claims under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which allows statutory damages of $100 to $1,000 per willful violation, even if no actual harm resulted from the violations. This claim also failed, because class members had not brought it up until their second round in trial court. Furthermore, the majority wrote, the FCRA claim is frivolous because Fleet is not a consumer reporting agency, as the law requires; agencies that merely pass on information about debts owed to it are not covered by the law. And under the FCRA, a report on transactions only between the customer and the agency making the report is specifically excluded from the definition of a "consumer report."

Thus, the court concluded, the claims of the information-sharing class actually are worthless, although defendants are still free to settle if they believe doing so is in their best interests. The opinion then goes on to strongly criticize the worth of the claim itself, the prolonged litigation, the objectors' request for attorney fees and the class action system in general. The decision of the trial court to award nothing to the objectors was affirmed.

The Chicago and Wheaton, Ill., law firm of DiTommaso-Lubin works often with the FCRA, as part of our privacy violations and consumer protection practice. We have handled FCRA "firm offer of credit" cases in our home state of Illinois and states around the country, in tandem with local counsel. If you think you may be a victim of improper and illegal credit reporting violations and you’d like to know more about your options, please contact us today to speak with an experienced consumer protection attorney.

If you believe you are the victim of a consumer fraud or scam that is harming many other individuals you should file a report with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC maintains a Consumer Sentinel database which can be used by law enforcement authorities all over the world to fight consumer fraud. Click here if you want to learn more about that database or want to make a complaint with the FTC.

The FTC has this to say about its Consumer Sentinel database:

Your complaints can help us detect patterns of wrong-doing, and lead to investigations and prosecutions. The FTC enters all complaints it receives into Consumer Sentinel, a secure online database that is used by thousands of civil and criminal law enforcement authorities worldwide. The FTC does not resolve individual consumer complaints.

The FTC works for the consumer to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices in the marketplace and to provide information to help consumers spot, stop, and avoid them.

If you are a victim of consumer fraud, unfair debt collection practices, or purchased a lemon automobile, rv or boat our Illinois based consumer fraud and class-action private sector lawyers may be able to assist you obtaining redress if the FTC, Illinois Attorney General or other government agency is unable to help you get your money back.

Class action lawsuits our firm has been involved in or spear-headed have led to very large consumer recoveries and in addition substantial awards totalling over a million dollars going to national and local consumer rights organizations including the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the National Consumer Law Center, and local law school consumer programs. DiTommaso-Lubin is proud of our achievements in assisting national and local consumer organizations and law school legal aid clinics obtain the funds needed to ensure that consumers are protected and informed of their rights. By standing up to consumer fraud and consumer rip-offs, and in the right case filing consumer protection lawsuits and class-actions you too can help ensure that other consumers' rights are protected from corporate misdeeds.

Our Naperville, Waukegan, Wilmette,Wheaton, Oak Brook, and Chicago consumer attorneys provide assistance in consumer fraud and consumer rights cases including in Illinois and throughout the country. You can click here to see a description of the some of the many individual and class-action consumer cases we have handled. A video of our lawsuit which helped ensure more fan friendly security at Wrigley Field can be found here. You can contact one of our Chicago area consumer protection lawyers here who can assist in lemon law, tele-marketing fraud, infomercial scams and frauds, unfair debt collection, junk fax, pre-recorded telephone solicitations, and other consumer, consumer fraud or consumer class action cases by filling out the contact form at the side of this blog or by clicking here.

One of the best websites to learn about consumer law issues and to find lawyers who specialize in consumer rights issues is the website of the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

The website contains numerous links to sections on Auto Fraud, Lemon Law, Predatory Lending Practices, Credit Reporting Problems and Debt Collection Abuse.

Class action lawsuits our firm has been involved in or spear-headed have led to substantial awards totalling over a million dollars to organizations including the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the National Consumer Law Center, and local law school consumer programs. DiTommaso-Lubin is proud of our achievements in assisting national and local consumer rights organizations obtain the funds needed to ensure that consumers are protected and informed of their rights. By standing up to consumer fraud and consumer rip-offs, and in the right case filing consumer protection lawsuits and class-actions you too can help ensure that other consumers' rights are protected from corporate misdeeds.

Our Naperville, Wheaton, Oak Brook, and Chicago consumer attorneys provide assistance in consumer fraud and consumer rights cases including in Illinois and throughout the country. You can click here to see a description of the some of the many individual and class-action consumer cases we have handled. A video of our lawsuit which helped ensure more fan friendly security at Wrigley Field can be found here. You can contact one of our Chicago area consumer protection lawyers here who can assist in lemon law, unfair debt collection, junk fax, prerecorded telephone solicitations, and other consumer, consumer fraud or consumer class action cases by filling out the contact form at the side of this blog or by clicking here.

The National Consumers League's Fraud Center is one of the best informational websites on the internet to learn about consumer rights and protection issues. Informed consumers are best armed to protect themselves from consumer scams and consumer frauds. The website contains sections for Telemarketing Fraud, Internet Fraud, Scams Against Businesses, Scams Against Elderly, Counterfeit Drugs, and a Fraud News section.

DiTommaso-Lubin is a private consumer rights law firm who associates with other law firms around the country that can help you recover funds lost due to fraud against brick and mortar companies in the United States with assets. All too often with many internet and telemarketing frauds this may not be possible as the scam artists may be overseas, hard to locate or without assets.

Class action lawsuits our firm has been involved in or spear-headed have led to substantial awards totalling over a million dollars to organizations including the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the National Consumer Law Center, and local law school consumer programs. DiTommaso-Lubin is proud of our achievements in assisting national and local consumer rights organizations obtain the funds needed to ensure that consumers are protected and informed of their rights. By standing up to consumer fraud and consumer rip-offs, and in the right case filing consumer protection lawsuits and class-actions you too can help ensure that other consumers' rights are protected from corporate misdeeds.

Our Naperville, Waukegan, Wilmette, Wheaton, Oak Brook, and Chicago consumer attorneys provide assistance in consumer fraud and consumer rights cases including in Illinois and throughout the country. You can click here to see a description of the some of the many individual and class-action consumer cases we have handled. A video of our lawsuit which helped ensure more fan friendly security at Wrigley Field can be found here. You can contact one of our Chicago area consumer protection lawyers here who can assist in lemon law, unfair debt collection, junk fax, prerecorded telephone solicitations, and other consumer, consumer fraud or consumer class action cases by filling out the contact form at the side of this blog or by clicking here.

One of the best websites to obtain information about consumer law topics and purchase consumer and lawyer oriented publications and books about consumer rights issues is the website of the National Consumer Law Center.

A particularly well done book offered by the National Consumer Law Center is called Surviving Debt. It is a "how to" book that consumers can use to learn about their rights regarding matters such as unfair debt collection practices. The National Consumer Law Center provides a detailed description of the book.

The National Consumer Law Center describes Surviving Debt as follows:

This new edition contains strategies on:

Dealing with debt collectors
Saving your home or car
Which debts to pay first and common mistakes consumers make that can actually get them into even more trouble
Managing credit card debt
Stopping eviction, lockouts and utility shut-offs
When you should and should not worry about your credit rating
When to refinance
Student loan consolidation options
How to find effective credit counseling agencies
Alternatives to filing bankruptcy and more
And includes a detailed index, and list of helpful websites
You Have Many Important Consumer Rights

If you are having debt problems, you may feel overwhelmed and powerless. During periods of financial hardship, you may not have the resources to pay pressing debts, to meet family needs, and to get necessary legal help. You may feel helpless to fight debt collectors pressing you for payment or threatening to seize your home, car, or other possessions.

In writing this book, we hope to help you even the playing field, and to make the best choices possible despite difficult financial circumstances. We will explain which debts you can ignore for a period of time while you get back on your feet. When you cannot ignore a particular debt without serious consequences, such as foreclosure or repossession, this book sets out helpful options to deal with these problems, both in the short term and the long run.

This book also explains your rights as a consumer. You are not powerless. Many federal and state laws are designed to provide help to people facing financial problems. These include protection against abusive debt collectors, relief from unfair business practices, limits on wage garnishments and seizures of property, and the right to eliminate many obligations in bankruptcy. In most cases, however, you need to know about your rights in order to exercise them. This book attempts both to explain these rights and tell you when and how to utilize them.

Class action lawsuits our firm has been involved in or spear-headed have led to substantial awards totalling over a million dollars to organizations including the National Association of Consumer Advocates, the National Consumer Law Center, and local law school consumer programs. DiTommaso-Lubin is proud of our achievements in assisting national and local consumer rights organizations obtain the funds needed to ensure that consumers are protected and informed of their rights. By standing up to consumer fraud and consumer rip-offs, and in the right case filing consumer protection lawsuits and class-actions you too can help ensure that other consumers' rights are protected from corporate misdeeds.

Our Naperville, Aurora, Elgin, Wilmette, Highland Park, Waukegan, Wheaton, Oak Brook, and Chicago consumer attorneys provide assistance in consumer fraud and consumer rights cases including in Illinois and throughout the country. You can click here to see a description of the some of the many individual and class-action consumer cases we have handled. A video of our lawsuit which helped ensure more fan friendly security at Wrigley Field can be found here. You can contact one of our Chicago area consumer protection lawyers here who can assist in lemon law, unfair debt collection, junk fax, prerecorded telephone solicitations, and other consumer, consumer fraud or consumer class action cases by filling out the contact form at the side of this blog or by clicking here.

Chicago and Oak Brook-based DiTommaso-Lubin has recently been working on a proposed class action consumer protection case with national reach, in tandem with colleagues in Maryland. Our case alleges violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, a federal law regulating when and how credit reporting agencies may provide information about consumers to third parties like marketing companies. The FCRA requires that credit agencies may only give out consumers' information if they have written permission or to companies that will extend a "firm offer of credit" to the consumers.

Our proposed lead plaintiff received a flyer offering him an automotive loan from a company that turned out to allegedly have nothing to do with the offer. That is, there was no firm offer of credit, in violation of the FCRA. It's important that our plaintiff suffered no actual financial damage due to this privacy violation, fortunately. However, under the FCRA, he doesn't need to if the violation of the law was "willful." Instead, he may sue for "statutory damages," an amount of money set by law, as well as the cost of attorneys' representation and any punitive damages the court decides to impose to punish illegal or very unethical behavior by the defendant.

The statutory damages authorized by the FCRA are very small by the standards of modern litigation -- $100 to $1,000 per person. In fact, this amount is so small that it might discourage both plaintiffs and their lawyers from pursuing a case, given the small reward. However, a proposed class action changes that landscape dramatically. In a class action, plaintiffs with the same complaint share the same lawyers, in essence pooling their resources. In doing so, they also pool the money they stand to win, from which the lawyers are paid. This allows them to move forward with a claim they might otherwise have had to abandon -- giving them greater access to justice.

In fact, even though a case with small damages might seem inappropriate for class-action status, it is actually one of the most appropriate cases for that status. We were able to make that argument to the court, citing multiple cases from around the United States federal courts, including cases from here in the Seventh Circuit and the greater Chicago area. The case is still pending, but we are confident about the facts and the quality of the legal work on our side of this case.

In addition to regulating how your information is disclosed to marketers and companies, the Fair Credit Reporting Act lays down rules for how credit reporting agencies should handle disputes, errors and negative information on your credit. Based in Oak Brook and Chicago, and serving people in Naperville, Wheaton, greater Chicago and throughout Illinois, our class action lawyers handle both FCRA lawsuits and consumer class actions and other types of class actions. To learn more about how you can fight for your rights please contact us for a free evaluation of your case.

To see more about our firm and the cases we have handled click here.

Are you a consumer with questions or concerns related to potential fraud and do not know what government agency to contact? The Chicago Federal Reserve Bank provides a web page that allows you to link to government agencies that may help you. The web page has links to federal and state banking agencies, federal and state securities agencies, and state insurance agencies located in Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin. You can also link to various useful financial , insurance, and banking tools, and to lists of financial services regulators, and consumer complaint filing information. Click here to link to the Chicago Federal Reserve Fraud web page.

If you need legal assistance in pursuing a civil lawsuit because government regulators cannot help you in recovering money lost due to fraud, our private sector lawyers can assist you by clicking here to contact us.

The Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued an opinion limiting class-action lawsuits regarding “firm offers of credit” under the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act. In Murray v. New Cingular Wireless Services, 2008 WL 1701839 (7th Cir. April 16, 2008), the Seventh Circuit also limited the scope of its 2004 decision in Cole v. U.S. Capital, Inc., 389 F.3d 719 (7th Cir. 2004). In that decision, the court said that when companies offer “a token line of credit” along with consumer goods, that credit offer must have value to the customer.

Among the issues addressed by the court are:
* Under Cole, an offer of credit entangled with an offer of merchandise must be valuable. However, Cole does not apply to “pure offers of credit” not entangled with another offer. The FCRA requires only that an offer of credit be firm, not that it be valuable to most or all of its recipients.
* An offer of “free” merchandise may be an offer of credit under some circumstances. In Murray, consumers complained that Cingular obtained their credit information in order to offer a “free phone.” However, since the free telephone was contingent on signing up for a service plan, it was not truly free. Thus, the offer of free merchandise was an offer of credit under the FCRA’s meaning.
* Advertisements need not contain all the terms of the credit under the FCRA; nothing in that law requires it. Indeed, wrote the majority, an initial offer containing the full terms of credit would be “turgid,” cumbersome and uninformative.
* Creditors may reserve the right to vary the terms of an offer and still extend an offer considered “firm” under the FCRA -- under some circumstances. The issue requires discovery, said the court.
* Small type cannot be considered “conspicuous,” at least in the offer at issue in Murray. In that instance, disclosures were printed in six-point type under advertising copy printed at more than twice the point size. However, the violation was not willful in this case because the law was not settled when the offer was made.

The decision is being hailed as a victory for defendants in FCRA class actions, but plaintiffs should note that several important issues are still open to litigation, especially with regard to varying terms of credit and disclosures made in very small type.

Murray combines three appeals from lower courts in the Midwest, all of which were putative class actions alleging violations of the FCRA. Murray v. New Cingular Wireless Servs., Inc., 432 F.Supp.2d 788 (N.D. Ill. 2006); Bruce v. KeyBank N.A., 2006 WL 3743749 (N.D. Ind. December 15, 2006); Price v. Capital One Bank (USA), N.A., 2007 WL 1521525 (E.D. Wis. May 22, 2007).