Coleman v. Exxon Mobil Corp.
| Decision Date | 13 April 2018 |
| Docket Number | Case No. 1:17-CV-119-SNLJ |
| Parties | MICHAEL COLEMAN, on behalf of himself and others similarly situated, Plaintiff, v. EXXON MOBIL CORPORATION, REEVES BOOMLAND, INC., and BI-STATE SOUTHERN OIL COMPANY Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Eastern District of Missouri |
"Is receiving an overly revealing credit card receipt—unseen by others and unused by identity thieves—a sufficient injury to confer Article III standing?" Bassett v. ABM Parking Servs., Inc., 883 F.3d 776, 777 (9th Cir. 2018). Under the facts of this case, it is not.
Plaintiff alleges defendants violated the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act ("the Act") by printing the first six digits of his credit card on the receipts they provided after he purchased gas. Defendants claim plaintiff does not have standing and have moved to dismiss (#16). Because plaintiff failed to allege a concrete injury, the motion will be granted.
Plaintiff alleges he got gas at one of the defendants' locations several times during the summer of 2017. Each time, after processing plaintiff's credit card, defendants provided a printed receipt that listed the first six and last four digits of plaintiff's sixteen-digit credit card number. Plaintiff alleges defendants "willfully" violated the Act, which prohibits defendants from printing more than the last five digits of plaintiff's credit card number on any receipt provided at the point of sale.
"On occasion, . . . [p]laintiff believes he has forgotten to pull his receipt out of the machine, leaving it hanging in public view." (#1 at 8, ¶ 58.) "At other times, . . . [p]laintiff believes he has thrown his receipt in the trash next to the pump." (#1 at 8, ¶ 59.) He does not allege anyone tried stealing his identity by using the information on his receipts. In fact, he does not allege anyone even saw the receipts, let alone the ten digits of his credit card number. Instead, plaintiff alleges the defendants caused him to "suffer a heightened risk of identity theft, and potentially exposed [his] private information to third parties who may have come into contact with those receipts." (#1 at 11-12, ¶ 84) (emphases added). As such, he seeks statutory and punitive damages.
Under Rule 12(b)(1) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, a court must dismiss a complaint if it lacks subject-matter jurisdiction. Arbaugh v. Y&H Corp., 546 U.S. 500, 514 (2006). At the motion-to-dismiss stage, the Court must "accept the allegations contained in the complaint as true and draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the nonmoving party." Cole v. Homier Dist. Co., 599 F.3d 856, 861 (8th Cir. 2010) (quoting Coons v. Mineta, 410 F.3d 1036, 1039 (8th Cir. 2005)).
The Act. Congress passed the Act, an amendment to the Fair Credit Reporting Act, to curb identity theft by reducing the personal information printed on credit and debit card receipts. Fair & Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003, Pub. L. No. 108-159, 117 Stat. 1952 (Dec. 4, 2003) (codified at 15 U.S.C. §§ 1681-1681x). The Act provides "no person that accepts credit cards or debit cards for the transaction of business shall print more than the last 5 digits of the card number or the expiration date upon any receipt provided to the cardholder at the point of the sale or transaction." 15 U.S.C. § 1681c(g)(1). A plaintiff may recover actual damages resulting from a negligent violation, id. § 1681o(a), or actual, statutory, and punitive damages for a willful violation, id. § 1681n(a).
After the Act's compliance deadline, consumers filed "hundreds of lawsuits" alleging merchants that failed to remove the expiration date (a requirement not at issue in this case) willfully violated the Act. Credit & Debit Card Receipt Clarification Act of 2007, Pub. L. No. 110-241, § 2(a)(4), 122 Stat. 1565 (June 3, 2008) (codified at 15 U.S.C. § 1681n(d)). Yet none of these consumers alleged their identity had been harmed. Id. § 2(a)(5). Congress responded by amending the Act so that persons who only violated the Act by printing expiration dates could not be sued for a willful violation for roughly four years. See id. § 3. In doing so, Congress stated the purpose of the amendment "is to ensure that consumers suffering from any actual harm to their credit or identity are protected while simultaneously limiting abusive lawsuits that do not protect consumers but only result in increased cost to business and potentially increased prices to consumers." Id. § 2(b) (emphasis added).
Accepting plaintiff's allegations as true, there is no doubt that defendants violated the statute. But that does not mean plaintiff automatically has standing to bring this claim. "Indeed, Congress does not have the final word on whether a plaintiff has alleged a sufficient injury for the purposes of standing[.]" Meyers v. Nicolet Rest. of De Pere, LLC, 843 F.3d 724, 727 (7th Cir. 2016), cert. denied, 137 S. Ct. 2267 (2017).
Article III Standing. Article III of the Constitution gives federal courts the power to decide actual cases and controversies only. U.S. Const. art. III, § 2. In fact, "[n]o principle is more fundamental to the judiciary's proper role in our system of government than the constitutional limitation of federal-court jurisdiction to actual cases or controversies." Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540, 1547 (2016), as revised (May 24, 2016) (alteration in original) (quoting Raines v. Byrd, 521 U.S. 811, 818 (1997)). Ruling without a case or controversy "create[s] the potential for abuse of the judicial process, distort[s] the role of the Judiciary in its relationship to the Executive and the Legislature[,] and open[s] the Judiciary to an arguable charge of providing government by injunction." Schlesinger v. Reservists Comm. to Stop the War, 418 U.S. 208, 222 (1974) (internal quotations omitted).
"Standing to sue is a doctrine rooted in the traditional understanding of a case or controversy." Spokeo, 136 S. Ct. at 1547. To satisfy the standing requirements, "plaintiff must have (1) suffered an injury in fact, (2) that is fairly traceable to the challenged conduct of the defendant, and (3) that is likely to be redressed by a favorable judicial decision." Id. "The plaintiff, as the party invoking federal jurisdiction, bears the burden of establishing these elements." Id.
This case deals with the injury-in-fact element. "To establish injury in fact, [the] plaintiff must show that he . . . suffered 'an invasion of a legally protected interest' that is [a] 'concrete and particularized' and [b] 'actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical.'" Id. at 1548 (quoting Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560 (1992)). Narrowing further, this case deals with the concrete component of the injury-in-fact element. A "concrete" injury "must actually exist" and be real, not abstract. Id.
Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016), is the Supreme Court's last word on the concrete component. In Spokeo, the Supreme Court analyzed when a statutory violation amounts to a concrete injury that satisfies Article III's injury-in-fact requirement. Id. at 1549. It explained a plaintiff does not automatically satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement just by alleging the violation of a statutory right. Id. For example, "a bare procedural violation, divorced from any concrete harm, [does not] satisfy the injury-in-fact requirement of Article III. Id.
Finally, the Supreme Court explained that while "tangible injuries are perhaps easier to recognize, we have confirmed in many of our previous cases that intangible injuries can nevertheless be concrete." Id. When analyzing an intangible injury, like the "heightened risk of identity theft" (#1 at 11, ¶ 84) alleged in this case, "both history and the judgment of Congress play important roles." Id. As for history, "it is instructive to consider whether an alleged intangible harm has a close relationship to a harm that has traditionally been regarded as providing a basis for a lawsuit in English or American courts." Id. As for Congress, it "may 'elevat[e] to the status of legally cognizable injuries concrete, de facto injuries that were previously inadequate in law.'" Id.(alteration in original) (quoting Lujan, 504 U.S. at 578). While not always the case, Id.
When a plaintiff alleges the violation of a procedural right granted by statute, the standing question boils down to this: "'whether the particular procedural violations alleged in this case entail a degree of risk sufficient to meet the concreteness requirement,' which in turn depends on 'whether the particular bare procedural violation may present a material risk of harm to the underlying concrete interest Congress sought to protect' in enacting the statutory requirement."1 Katz v. Donna Karan Co., L.L.C., 872 F.3d 114, 118 (2d Cir. 2017) (internal citations omitted) (quoting Crupar-Weinmann v. Paris Baguette Am., Inc., 861 F.3d 76, 80-81 (2d Cir. 2017)). Of course, the Court also is guided by history and the judgment of Congress.
No Material Risk of Identify Theft. Both parties agree Congress passed the Act to protect consumers from identity theft by limiting the personal data printed on creditand debit card receipts. The question now is whether plaintiff has alleged a material risk of identity theft. The Court finds that he has not for at least two reasons.
First, plaintiff's identity can be stolen only if another person actually steals it. So naturally, many courts answering this question analyze whether any third party actually saw or possessed the overly revealing receipt. See, e.g., Katz v. Donna Karan Int'l, Inc., No. 14 CIV. 740 (PAC), 2017 WL 2191605, at *5 ...
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