In Williams v. Capital One Bank (USA), N.A., 2018 WL 317712, at *10 (N.D.Ala., 2018), the District Court found that the Rooker-Feldman doctrine did not bar an FCRA claim.
Without question, the plaintiff in the present action has stated his belief that the default judgment entered against him in state court is meritless. Even so, his actual claim against Capital One is based upon Capital One’s alleged failures to conduct an appropriate re-investigation of his claim, and to appropriately report the results of the re-investigation to consumer reporting agencies. That claim challenges Capital One’s actions and inactions with regard to the reporting of Williams’s debt, but it does not challenge the validity of the debt itself. Accordingly, success on Williams’s FCRA claim in this case would not “effectively nullify” the state court default judgment, nor is it true that Williams’s federal claims can succeed only to the extent that the state court wrongly decided the issues before it. See Alvarez, 679 F.3d at 1263. Because Williams’s FCRA claim is not inextricably intertwined with the state court default judgment, the Rooker-Feldman doctrine does not bar the claim
However, the District Court found that the creditor was not the one that furnished information regarding the underlying judgment, which the CRA obtained from public sources.
Capital One undisputably is plaintiff’s creditor, but it nevertheless asserts that it is not a “furnisher of information” within the meaning of the statute, because it was not the party who notified Equifax of the default judgment against plaintiff. That argument is supported by the statutory language. Section 1681s-2(b) sets forth the duties of a “person” after that “person” receives notice of a dispute “with regard to the completeness or accuracy of any information provided by [that] person to a consumer reporting agency.” 15 U.S.C. § 1681s-2(b)(1) (alteration supplied).29 See also West v. JP Morgan Chase, No. 3:17-CV-01450, 2017 WL 5624496, at *3 (M.D. Tenn. Nov. 22, 2017) (“Although the statute does not expressly define the term ‘furnishers of information,’ the statute delineating such furnishers’ duties implies that a furnisher of information is any entity that provides information ‘relating to a consumer’ to any consumer reporting agency.”). According to plaintiff’s Equifax credit report, a copy of which was attached to the affidavit he submitted in support of his Second Amended Complaint, Equifax obtained information about the default judgment “from local, state and federal courts through a third party vendor, LexisNexis.” Because LexisNexis, and not Capital One, provided Equifax with the information about Capital One’s judgment against plaintiff, Capital One cannot be considered a “furnisher of information” for the purposes of plaintiff’s FCRA claim, and it cannot be held responsible for failure to follow any of the investigatory and reporting procedures set forth in 15 U.S.C. § 1681s-2(b)(1). Cf. Donohue v. C. Blosenski Disposal Co., No. 05-5356, 2006 WL 3423888, at *1 (E.D. Pa. Nov. 28, 2006) (holding that a creditor who provided information regarding a past due debt to a collection agency, instead of a consumer reporting agency, was not a “furnisher of information” under the FCRA).