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Continued Collection Activity B4 Validation?


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Hello folks!

I need some input with regards to the following scenario...

Day 1 - Initial Dunning letter received

Day 8 - Letter disputing debt and requesting validation mailed CMRRR

Day 16 - CMRRR DV letter signed for by CA

Day 23 - CA does a hard pull of the consumer's CR

Ten days post hard pull, nothing has been received from the CA.

My question is this; would doing a hard pull of the consumer's CR after receiving a timely DV and without having first validated the debt constitute "continued collection activity" per FDCPA?

Your insights would be appreciated, thanks!

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The real question is whether it is an actionable violation under FDCPA and the answer is it depends... What was their permissible purpose for the inquiry? Account review or Collection?

Truth of the matter is they pulled your report because they don't have squat, so they are trying to fill in the blanks and complete their own billing statement without contacting the OC.

I guess you could make an argument that they are trying to circumvent the DV process, but then how do you show damages?

Have they updated your CR while the DV is pending? This would be a more serious violation because the judge may buy the excuse that they pulled your report to make sure they got the right person, which is the legal purpose of DV, but there is no excuse to continue reporting if they did not respond to a timely DV.

I ask all these questions because many judges want to see a pattern of FDCPA violations and a single hard pull may not be enough to award damages. Unless one of your creditors took an adverse credit action against you because the inquiry lowered your score, there is little incentive for the judge to take the violation seriously.

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They haven't reported anything on the person's CR so there was nothing to update.

The only PP possible would be specifically for collection purposes I would think - I can't see "Account Review" as a reason or any basis for the CA to make that claim were they challenged on the purpose of their inquiry.

At this point, I guess we'll wait and see if they bother to validate at all but I"m suspecting they won't.

Thanks!

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