Page:Dennis Obduskey v. McCarthy & Holthus LLP.pdf/14

Rh ” with the debtor, as when the repo man sneaks up and “tows a car in the middle of the night.” Brief for Petitioner 25–26, and n. 13. And because, according to Obduskey, the language of §1692f(6), which forbids “[t]aking or threatening to take any nonjudicial action to effect dispossession or disablement of property,” applies more naturally to the seizure of personal property than to nonjudicial foreclosure. (Emphasis added.)

But we do not see why that is so. The limited-purpose provision speaks broadly of “the enforcement of security interests,” §1692a(6), not “the enforcement of security interests in personal property”; if Congress meant to cover only the repo man, it could have said so. Moreover, Obduskey’s theory fails to save the limited-purpose definition from superfluity. As we have just discussed, supra, at 7–8, if the Act contained only the primary definition, enforcement of a security interest would at least be an indirect collection of a debt. The same may well be true of repo activity, a form of security-interest enforcement, as the point of repossessing property that secures a debt is to collect some or all of the value of the defaulted debt. And while Obduskey argues that the language of §1692f(6) fits more comfortably with repossession of personal property than nonjudicial foreclosure, we think it at least plausible that “threatening” to foreclose on a consumer’s home without having legal entitlement to do so is the kind of “nonjudicial action” without “present right to possession” prohibited by that section. §1692f(6)(A). (We need not, however, here decide precisely what conduct runs afoul of §1692f(6).)

We are also unmoved by Obduskey’s argument that repossession would not fall under the primary definition because it generally involves only limited communication with the debtor. For one thing, while some of the FDCPA’s substantive protections apply where there has been a “communicat[ion]” with a consumer, see, e. g.,