In Scribner v. Works & Lentz, Inc., 2016 WL 3981435, at *1 (C.A.10 (Okla.), 2016), the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit resolved the FDCPA’s statutory conflict prohibiting communications which directly or indirectly disclose the debt (15 USC 1692c(b) and permissible communications to obtain location information (15 USC 1692b)
In Marx v. General Revenue Corp., 668 F.3d 1174, 1177-78 (10th Cir. 2011), cert. granted in part by 132 S. Ct. 2688, and judgment aff’d by 133 S. Ct. 1166 (2013), we decided § 1692c(b)’s prohibition on third-party contact is limited to communications as defined in § 1692a(2) and, hence, once it is determined that a debt collector’s contact with a third party (in Marx, a fax seeking to verify the debtor’s employment) does not convey information about a debt, there can be no violation of § 1692c(b). Accord Brown v. Van Ru Credit Corp., 804 F.3d 740, 742-45 (6th Cir. 2015) (following Marx). . . .First, the argument depends on equating § 1692a(2)’s broad and inclusive reference to “the conveying of information regarding a debt directly or indirectly” (emphasis added) with § 1692b(2)’s strict and specific reference to “stat[ing] that [the] consumer owes a[ ] debt” (emphasis added). These are not equivalent. One can convey some information regarding a debt (especially indirectly) to a third party so as to trigger § 1692c(b) without stating “consumer ‘x’ owes a debt.” Thus, it appears § 1692b’s location-information exception may still be available to excuse contact otherwise coming within § 1692c(b)’s prohibition on third-party communications as defined in § 1692a(2). In any event, basically the same redundancy/superfluity argument, directed at one of the other conditions for invoking § 1692b’s location-information exception, was squarely rejected in Marx. Sub-section 1695b(5) requires the debt collector to avoid use of language or symbols evincing a prohibited “communication.” In Marx, this court conceded the debtor’s point that giving effect to the statutory definition of communication made § 1692b(5) superfluous (because it would be satisfied only when there had been no communication to violate § 1692c(b) in the first place), but noted “[a] court should not apply the superfluity canon [in construing the statute] unless it first determines that the term being construed is ambiguous.” Marx, 668 F.3d at 1183. Holding “the statutory definition of the key term ‘communication’ is unambiguous,” Marx “decline[d] to avoid [the superfluity the term created] by creating an ambiguity where none exists.” Id. at 1184. We cannot accept Scribner’s similar argument here without impermissibly diverging from our holding in Marx.