In Tourgeman v. Collins Financial Services, Inc., 2012 WL 1327824 (S.D.Cal. 2012), Judge Bencivengo held that a Plaintiff lacked standing in a class action to pursue a UCL claim based on a violation of the FDCPA/Rosenthal Act.
Upon consideration of the briefing before the Court, and argument of counsel, the Court finds that Plaintiff has not met his burden to establish standing sufficient to represent at UCL class of individuals. Critically, he has not demonstrated that he personally “has sustained or is immediately in danger of sus-taining some direct injury as the result of” DFS’s future debt portfolio sales—the subject of the injunction sought. City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95, 102, 103 S.Ct. 1660, 75 L.Ed.2d 675 (1983) (internal quotations omitted). Nor has he established that the injury or threat of injury is “both real and immediate, not conjectural or hypothetical.” Id.Indeed, for Plaintiff to suffer harm as a result of the injunctive relief he seeks, he would have to purchase another computer from Dell, finance it, default on the loan, receive a letter from a collections agency which identifies the wrong creditor, and incur expense as a result of such a letter. Such a “chain of highly speculative contingencies” does not warrant a finding of standing on an injunctive relief claim. See Nelsen, 895 F.2d at 1252–53 (denying motion for class certi-fication for lack of standing on injunctive relief claims where plaintiffs’ likelihood of suffering future harm was highly speculative.) Plaintiff does not allege that he has any current relationship with DFS. Nor has Plaintiff produced any evidence that DFS’s errors in identifying the original creditors on the debt portfolios it sells are the result of any “systematic pattern or policy” that would justify the finding of standing to seek an injunction to address the threat of future harm. See Id. at 1254.The Court is not persuaded by Plaintiff’s ar-gument that Judge Sammartino has already deter-mined the standing issue in her November 23, 2009 order denying DFS’s motion to dismiss the UCL claim. [Doc. No. 276 at 1, citing Doc. No. 89.] That order is inapposite to the present issue as it pertains to Plaintiff’s Second Amended Complaint, which is not the operative complaint here, and, critically, did not contain any allegations as to DFS’s alleged misidenti-fication of the original creditor on the debt portfolios, nor any articulation of the injunctive relief which Plaintiff now seeks. [See Doc. No. 60.]The case law Plaintiff cites does not compel a different result. In Henderson et al. v. Gruma Corp., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 41077 (C.D. Cal. April 11, 2011), upon which Plaintiff heavily relies, the court found that the plaintiffs had established Article III standing to raise their false advertising claim under California law, despite the fact that they were unlikely to be deceived by the product labeling again, because the alternative result would “surely thwart the objective of California’s consumer protection laws.” Id. at * 20. Since the defendants in that case were continuing to label the products with the allegedly misleading information, the court found that the “plaintiffs, as representatives of a class, should be entitled to pursue injunctive relief on behalf of all consumers in order to protect consumers from defendant’s alleged false advertising.” Id. at *21. By contrast, here, there is nothing to suggest that there is an ongoing, continuing harm to other potential class members, or to Plaintiff himself. See Ellis, 657 F.3d at 979 (plaintiff has the burden to establish Article III standing exists).Because Plaintiff cannot demonstrate that he is likely to be injured by the conduct he seeks to enjoin, and because he has not demonstrated that the conduct at issue is the subject of systematic pattern or policy that is ongoing and likely to continue to harm potential class members, the Court finds that Plaintiff lacks standing to bring a UCL claim for injunctive relief, and his request for certification of a UCL class is therefore DENIED