Consumer Sues Verizon, Credit Agencies for Inaccurate Account Reports

and Innovis Data Solutions as defendants. Plaintiff Henry Sobol of Santa Clarita, California, canceled his Verizon Wireless account in September in good standing and contacted the carrier to ask it to transfer his numbers to a new carrier, said the complaint. Verizon confirmed by email that the numbers were successfully transferred and his service would end Sept. 7, it said. Verizon’s billing cycle for Sobol began on the eighth of every month under its automatic payment system. On Sept. 28, Sobol received an email saying he would be reimbursed $15.02 for the unused pro rata portion of the September bill, and his October statement showed a zero balance, the complaint said. In January, third-party debt collector IC System informed Sobol he owed an unpaid balance of $125.42 to Verizon, a charge he disputed. Despite several attempts to dispute the validity of the debt, Verizon “persists in claiming the debt as valid and reporting this debt,” the complaint said. Verizon should have discovered from its records that the reported amount was inaccurate, and it failed to relay all relevant information in Sobol’s dispute to the credit bureaus, which also were required to do their own reasonable reinvestigations into Sobol’s account, plaintiff said. Though Trans Union acknowledged the debt was invalid in February, a month later it changed the status of Sobol’s Verizon account to show it in collections. Verizon “submits inaccurate credit information” about Sobol’s account to the four credit bureaus every 30 days, says the suit. Sobol charges Verizon with violation of the Rosenthal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and the California Credit Reporting Agencies Act and all defendants with violation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Sobol seeks an award of actual, punitive and statutory damages, plus attorneys’ costs and legal fees.