Consumer Privacy

Telephone Consumer Protection Act

On February 22, 2015 / Class Actions, Consumer Privacy, Featured Practice Area, Practice Areas

Few things are more irritating that being interrupted by unwanted sales calls. Even worse is having telemarketers take up your valuable cell phone minutes or fax paper. In 1991, Congress passed the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to help protect people like you from these abuses.

Prohibited Conduct

Under the TCPA, telemarketers are prohibited from:

making calls to cell phones using automated telephone dialing equipment or an artificial or prerecorded voice without consent
sending unsolicited advertising faxes
sending unsolicited advertising text messages
calling residences before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m., local time
failing to honor the national Do Not Call registry

What You Can Do

Congress also gave the TCPA some teeth: violators may be liable for up to $1,500 in statutory damages for each violation. If a company adopted a systematic policy of violating the TCPA, a class action claim might be possible for damages and/or a court order stopping the illegal practice. Caddell & Chapman is currently representing plaintiffs bringing claims on behalf of classes of consumers seeking such remedies against telemarketers.

You May Not Be the Only One

At the law firm of Caddell & Chapman, our attorneys have more than a decade of experience handling significant privacy class actions, including claims under federal privacy statutes such as the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) and TCPA on a nationwide basis.

When you contact us to review your complaint against a telemarketer, we will thoroughly review whether other people have been impacted as well.

If that is the case, we will pursue a class action lawsuit to seek compensation for everyone who has suffered damages due to the same act of wrongdoing, and to order the defendant to change its practices.

Security Breaches and Identity Theft

On February 13, 2015 / Class Actions, Consumer Privacy, Practice Areas

Have you been the victim of identity theft? Do you believe that your personal information was taken due to a security breach on the part of a bank, an insurance company or some other business that was supposed to keep that data safe?

Identity theft can be costly, but you may have the right to pursue action against the business or the data warehouse that was tasked with keeping your information safe. You may be able to obtain compensation for the losses you have suffered.

How Identity Theft Happens

While there are certainly individual cases of identity theft in which a criminal gets access to someone’s personal information, perhaps more common are cases of mass security breaches that allow the personal information of many people to fall into the wrong hands.

Initially, it is reasonable to hold the bank, insurance company or other business that gathered the information accountable.

In actuality, these businesses are often victims as well. They enlist data warehouses to hold all of their customers’ personal information. When these warehouses fail to keep that information secure, the business will have to pay all the costs of cleaning up the mess, which may include reissuing credit cards and more.

Security Breaches Impact More Than One Person

At the Texas law firm of Caddell & Chapman, our attorneys have more than two decades of experience handling significant consumer protection cases on a national level.

Our first step is to determine how many people were impacted by a security breach. Our goal is to file a class action lawsuit to compensate you for identity theft and compensate everyone else who suffered due to the same error.

We also represent banks that are victims in security breach cases, putting our experience to work to hold data warehouses accountable for identity theft issues. For example, we served as co-lead and liaison counsel in litigation against Heartland Payment Systems over the largest data breach in history — over 130 million consumer files. Heartland processes payment card transactions for about 250,000 merchants and handles an average of more than 100 million transactions per month and more than $80 billion in transactions a year. Heartland provides merchants with the ability to accept debit and credit cards as payments by connecting the merchants’ card terminals with the card issuer to verify the transaction, and then moving the funds from the issuing bank to the merchant’s band account. In late January 2009, Heartland admitted that it had a massive security breach resulting in the compromise of up to 100 million credit card numbers resulting from a break into Heartland’s systems, perhaps as early as May 2008. Software that was used to steal card data was implanted into Heartland’s systems. As a result of this breach, confidential information regarding Plaintiffs’ customers and the credit card accounts Plaintiffs’ established for its customers was compromised.

Fair Credit Reporting Act

On February 13, 2015 / Class Actions, Consumer Privacy, Featured Practice Area, Practice Areas

Do you believe that there has been an error on your credit file which has negatively affected your credit score? Has this error caused you to be denied credit? Has it brought on higher interest rates or increased insurance premiums?
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Do you believe that there has been an error in your background information that has caused you to be denied employment or to be terminated from your job?

These errors should not happen. They are clear violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA). You have the right to seek compensation for the damages caused by these credit reporting and background check errors.

Unsurpassed FCRA Experience

Caddell & Chapman has served as lead or co-lead counsel in some of the largest FCRA class actions in history, including:

a case that recovered $100 million on behalf of consumers whose confidential financial information was used to create and sell “target marketing” lists to advertisers;
a ground-breaking settlement that changed the way the debts of consumers who have filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy are reported nationwide; and
a settlement that will give every adult in the United States the right to view and correct information being collected about them by one of the nation’s largest data brokers.

No matter how big the case, we can help.

Common Credit Reporting Errors

Some of the most common types of errors on credit reports provided by credit reporting agencies—including Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion—is the reporting of debts that are not actually owed or that are owed by someone else. Also common is the reporting of debts older than 7 years, which by law must be removed from your report. You can visit our review site about debt consolidation. If you have experienced inaccurate reports that damage your credit, contact us to investigate.

Criminal Background Check Errors

Many common criminal background check errors involve merged files. This happens when the files of two people with the same name are merged together. If one has a criminal record, it will show up in the other’s background check, regardless of the fact that the two people have different birth dates and Social Security numbers. Caddell & Chapman was co-lead counsel in one of the largest ever class action recoveries involving criminal background checks. For those seeking to clear their criminal record, also called expungement Michigan law requires meeting several important conditions.

Know Your Rights

If you were denied housing or a job based on negative information in your credit report, you have a right to see a copy of that report and dispute the information. If companies willfully fail to comply with these FCRA provisions, you may be entitled to statutory damages of $100-$1,000 per violation.

If it Happened to You, it May Have Happened to Someone Else

At the law firm of Caddell & Chapman, our attorneys have more than a decade of experience handling significant FCRA class actions on a nationwide basis.

When you contact us to review your credit report dispute, we will thoroughly review it whether other people have been impacted as well.

If that is the case, we will pursue a class action lawsuit to seek compensation for everyone who has suffered damages due to the same act of wrongdoing.