Opinion ID: 4510978
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Disclosure and Summary of Rights Claims

Text: The lack of evidence of concrete harm to absent class members is even more stark when considering the disclosure and summary of rights claims. The first alleges that TransUnion willfully failed to disclose class members’ full credit reports by not including the OFAC information when sending consumers’ credit files—that is to say, by sending the information in a separate mailing. The second claim relates to TransUnion’s failure to include a summary of rights in the envelope containing the OFAC letter. Notably, TransUnion sent the credit reports and OFAC alerts contemporaneously. Omitting the OFAC information 56 RAMIREZ V. TRANSUNION from the credit summary and instead sending it “within hours,” may be a technical violation of FCRA’s disclosure requirement, and the “shock,” that Ramirez testified he felt upon receiving the separate OFAC communication is sufficient to confer Article III standing upon him. There was no evidence, however, that a single other class member so much as opened the dual mailings, or that anyone other than Ramirez was surprised to receive them. Similarly, TransUnion’s OFAC letter failed to inform him how to dispute being a potential watch list match, an omission that confused Ramirez, who plainly has standing to bring a summary of rights claim. But whether any other absent class member was confused, suffered the adverse consequences that befell Ramirez, or even opened the letter, is pure conjecture. For the absent class members, evidence of disclosure and summary of rights violations were only “a bare procedural violation, divorced from any concrete harm,” Spokeo II, 136 S. Ct. at 1549, and no common law analogue or clear congressional directive suggests that Article III requirements are satisfied in the face of such an absence of evidence.