On November 27, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey granted a defendant’s motion to dismiss a class action case brought under the FDCPA. The court agreed with the defendant that the plaintiffs did not suffer “concrete injury” and therefore did not have standing to sue.

The plaintiffs received debt collection letters from the defendant stating that the defendant might “take additional collection efforts” including sending “a negative credit report” if there was no response within seven days. The plaintiffs alleged the letters were “deceptive” because they violated the defendant’s own policy of credit reporting at 60 days and not seven days. The defendant moved to dismiss, arguing the plaintiffs suffered no “concrete injury” and therefore did not have standing to bring this case.

Because the plaintiffs did not incur any concrete harm—they did not allege any out-of-pocket expenses or public embarrassment as a result of the collection letters—the plaintiffs instead advanced a “novel” standing argument. Turning to the Supreme Court’s decision in TransUnion LLC v. Ramirez, the plaintiffs argued that violation of a traditional tort that Congress had elevated by statute can provide sufficient “concrete harm.” Under this theory, the plaintiffs argued that the collection letter violated the “anchor tort” of unreasonable debt collection when Congress had elevated to a statutory basis when enacting the FDCPA.

The court disagreed. In its opinion, the court noted that the plaintiffs had only provided two relevant cases indicating the existence of the unreasonable debt collection tort, both of which were from Texas, the oldest of which was nearly 70 years old. The court held that “a tort that exists in only one jurisdiction is not prevalent enough to be traditional,” and there was no precedent to determine whether a 70-year-old tort was old enough to be “traditional.” Accordingly, the court ruled in favor of the defendant and granted a motion to dismiss.