Little Guy Wins Against Hone Depot

[Lee Michaels]

[John T]

"only avaible to registered members".

Give us a summary, please?

John

[CW]

>>>

[Jeff P.]

That's funny. I'm not registered and I was able to see it.

[Lee Michaels]

"John T" > wrote

Credit Scam Victim Nails Home Depot

Man whose identity- theft complaints were ignored wins a $1-million judgment.

By David Haldane Times Staff Writer

February 19, 2005

Home Depot ignored Alan R. Sporn for almost two years, but a $1-million court judgment got the company's attention.

The Laguna Hills businessman had his Social Security number stolen, which ended up in a dozen requests for Home Depot credit.

The fiasco hurt Sporn's credit rating, but the home improvement giant that prides itself in customer service brushed off his concerns - until he filed a lawsuit, won and then tried to collect the money from a company bank account.

Then, Home Depot decided to act. It appealed the case, but this week an appellate court in Santa Ana sided with Sporn.

On Friday, the victor and his lawyer were celebrating with a bit of humor. The pair joked they might just show up at one of the company's Southern California stores to conduct a yard sale.

"I want to sell everything for a dollar," quipped Steve Young, Sporn's attorney. "I imagine the John Deere tractors will be the first to go."

"I feel vindicated," Sporn, 52, said of his nearly 3-year effort to get Home Depot to respond. "They're such a huge corporation and we are just little people."

In a brief written statement, the Atlanta-based company said that it was "disappointed in the decision . and respectfully disagrees with the conclusions of the court."

Sporn's problems began in early 2002 when he was turned down for a low-interest loan to refinance his Laguna Hills home. Trying to find out why, he learned that Home Depot had submitted inquiries to credit agencies regarding Sporn's creditworthiness at least a dozen times over the previous year.

Such inquiries - especially when submitted in large numbers - lower one's credit rating.

"I didn't even have a credit card with Home Depot," Sporn said in a telephone interview Friday. Except for buying "the occasional garden hose or lightbulb," he doesn't even shop there often, he said.

When he asked the company's financial department why it was pulling his credit reports, he was told that somebody in Virginia was using his Social Security number to apply for credit, Sporn said.

But Home Depot would not tell him who the culprit was. And when he sent the company a certified letter asking it to stop checking his credit rating, he got no response.

Finally, in September 2002, Sporn filed a lawsuit demanding compensation for the financial damages he says he incurred. The company continued to ignore him, he says. He told Home Depot he was seeking a default judgment. Still no response, he says.Nine months later, in July 2003, with nary a word from Home Depot, a Santa Ana judge awarded Sporn about $930,000 in damages.

The judge ruled that Sporn suffered losses when he was forced to pay a higher interest rate on his home loan and because his damaged credit rating hurt his business reputation.

The court also ruled that Sporn was entitled to a 10% annual interest rate and other collection expenses if Home Depot continued to delay payment. Sporn and his attorney estimate the current amount at $1.15 million.

Home Depot didn't show up for the court hearings, they say.

"After we got the judgment," said Young, the attorney, "we waited another seven months expecting that they would do something. Frankly, we just wanted their attention so they would clean this up."

So last February, Sporn and Young contacted the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, which sent deputies to the bank that handles Home Depot's payroll accounts - a Wells Fargo branch in Los Angeles - with a court order.

They didn't get any money, but they did get Home Depot's attention. "They started a paper flurry that you wouldn't believe," Young said.

In its appeal, the company accused Sporn of being underhanded. Home Depot said in its filings that Sporn "obtained by stealth" the "excessive" default judgment, which the company discovered only when Sporn "began enforcement efforts after laying in the weeds for many months."

In its ruling - published Wednesday - the 4th District Court of Appeal disagreed.

The court scolded the company for seeking "to escape the results of its own carelessness."

"An obvious gap appears in the evidence," acting presiding judge William F. Rylaarsdam wrote.

"There is no statement that the [court papers sent to Home Depot] were lost, stolen, forwarded to the wrong person, or eaten by the dog."

Richard S. Ruben, an Orange County-based attorney for Home Depot, declined to comment on the case, saying that he had not had a chance to read the appellate court's ruling.

The company said it was reviewing its options to appeal the decision.

But Sporn and Young said they were overjoyed.

"A corporation," Young said, "doesn't have skin and blood - the only way you get their attention is with the sting of the dollar."

*

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Times staff writer Dan Weikel contributed to this report.

[AAvK]

...yeah, and that amount of $ for HD is a nickel in a bucket of them, just about nothing. Thanks for pasting it.

[10x]

great place to get bogus log-in names and passwords. You can't get one for every site, but many newspapers are listed. All you do is enter the URL for the site, and if the site is listed, it comes back with log-in name and password.

Joe

aka 10x

[John Flatley]

Let's sock it to the big nasty corporation, they have deep pockets! Don't blame or sue any individuals just because they are at fault, they don't have enough money. Sue the big box. Just remember, if the big box loses, the judgement will become a business expense.

A business expense! Selling prices = expenses + profits. When expenses go up, prices go up. (prices will go up to maintain profits/stock value) Who pays for higher prices. Bingo! The consumer. All the customers at Home Depot pay the price. The offended customer gets relief and the plaintiff's lawyers build another seven-figure income.

As an occasional Home Depot customer, my wallet should be grateful this didn't turn into a class action lawsuit.

And when the legal dust and smoke clears, what happens to the Home Depot employees at fault? Those that didn't do anything to resolve the plaintiff's credit problem?

Sue the %$&#*s, we can afford it. Can't we?

Jack

-- If we can't teach our children the 3 Rs, how can we teach them economics?

[Larry Jaques]

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 23:31:23 -0600, the inscrutable John T spake:

The LAT article was much better, but here's another take

[Edwin Pawlowski]

The judgment is too high, IMO, but HD should not have ignored the guy. There should be a penalty.

Perhaps if it did they would mend their ways.

They should be fired. Take their annual salary and that is what the plaintiff should be awarded.

[Han]

How did the plaintiff's SSN get stolen? Where else did it end up? Did he get an annual credit report, and dispute the "funny" entries?

[Philip Lewis]

I might agree with you, but i don't have enough information to make that judgement... do you?

The article posted here did not indicate what actual damages were incurred. Not to mention all the time hassle of dealing with it.

[Never Enough Money]

So now we require companies to also do detective work? Companies resposible for stolen identities? Aren't we going overboard here?

Lee Michaels wrote:

$1-million

Southern

Sporn's

compensation for

damages.

payment.

enforcement

Appeal

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Rick Cook]

Not only no, but hell no! Identity theft is a serious problem precisely because companies do a pathetically inadequate job of checking before granting credit and then ignore the injured parties for as long as they possibly can.

In this case the store received a dozen credit applications from the same person. That alone would have raised red flags in a reasonably run business. Then even when the problem was brought to their attention, they not only refused to do anything about it, they couldn't even be bothered to show up in court!

This kind of behavior is utterly outrageous and well deserving of a million-dollar judgment.

--RC

[Edwin Pawlowski]

It stated he had to pay a higher interest rate on his mortgage. He obviously has a hassle with the paperwork and repeated call to HD. That does not add up to a million bucks, IMO.

[John]

I think the point is that ONCE someone notifies a corporate entity that attempted identity thieft is happening with credit apps to THEIR store, that they should have 1 - Acknowledge the notification and 2- Put that SS number on a black list and not accepted NOR tried to process any apps with that SS number

No one is asking the corporate entity to do detective work, but they SHOULD not ignore folks reporting this kind of stuff, apparently repeatedly reporting it.

John

[John]

Frankly, for the GROSS negligence of HD in this case, I am surprised that they did NOT hit them for MORE in punitive damages. Big Corporate entities like HD ONLY respond when the cost gets big enough

And if they do it again, I would love to see them hit with damages in the 10s of Millions OR MORE. If they think they are above the law, maybe put them out of business via lawsuit would NOT be excessive

If you have a total woth of $100k, would someone suing you for $25 or $100 dollars actually make you change your actions?? Same idea when you talk about BIG corporate entities. Frankly, I would rather see damage issued in PERCENTAGE of the company woth rather than a set dollar amount. That would make things fair across the board from the low income individual to the MultiBillion dollar folks like MicroSoft and Bill Gate

John

[Philip Lewis]

But it doesn't say how much of a mortgage it is. Over the life of a loan that can be a lot.

It also mentioned damage to his business's reputation, IIRC. How do you quantify that?

...And attorney fees, time off work, and... well you get the picture.

We simply do not know enough facts to make a call to the legitimacy of the claim.

[fredfighter]

Non Sequitor. To be effective, punitive dmages must be high enough to disabuse the malefactor from a repetition of the tort. Otherwise it may be cheaper to absord the suits as a cost of doing business and continue to ruin the credit ratings of numerous other persons many of whom will never find out why.

[Tim Douglass]

tried to resolve the problem before resorting to court. He wrote a letter, but did he follow up with a phone call to the HD credit department? Home Depot didn't respond to a lawsuit that was filed? I find that hard to believe unless the papers were served on HD by taking them to the local Borg and handing them to a sales clerk. I wouldn't be surprised if the lawyer did something like that just to try to ensure that they didn't make it to court.

I don't think HD should be absolved of all responsibility, but almost a million bucks is pretty extreme unless he can demonstrate

*intentional* damage and not just incompetence.

There are a lot of holes in the story. Was credit issued based on any of the fraudulent applications? Did the credit checks reveal them to be fraudulent? How much effort did he put into cleaning his credit rating when he discovered the problem?

I played a similar game a couple years ago after a stolen credit card. A few hours on the phone ended up resolving everything with no permanent impact on my credit rating - in fact I cleaned up a couple things I didn't even know were there while I was at it. This whole thing just smacks of the philosophy of trying to become a lawsuit millionaire because of a small problem.

Tim Douglass