A federal District Judge for the Northern District of Georgia, Victoria Marie Calvert, awarded a default judgment to the CFPB against USASF, a car loan servicer of loans originated by U.S. Auto Sales Inc., a buy-here, pay-here dealership. The claim was based on alleged violations of myriad consumer protection rules.

However, Judge Calvert did not accept the estimates of damages the alleged violations caused, saying they were flawed because a CFPB data scientist used figures suggested by bureau attorneys.  Judge Calvert found that the company had, among other things, erroneously used Starter Interruption Devices thousands of times—disabling vehicles whose owners were not overdue on their payments.

The company also erroneously billed consumers for collateral-protection insurance—physical damage insurance protecting the company if the buyer has insufficient insurance– more than 34,000 times.

However, when it came to assessing damages, Judge Calvert rejected CFPB assessments.

“To calculate restitution and compensatory damages, the Bureau relies on the Declaration of Senior Data Scientist Nicole Kelly,” the judge wrote. “However, the Kelly Declaration’s compensatory damages estimate is flawed because it relies on estimates provided by litigation counsel.”

For instance, in a declaration to the court, Kelly stated, “Bureau counsel asked me to calculate the total amount of harm Defendant caused by wrongfully repossessing consumers’ vehicles. At the request of Bureau counsel, I used a flat amount of $5,000 of harm for each wrongful repossession.” on consumer declarations.”

The judge said the bureau derived the flat amounts based on consumer declarations and citations to damages awarded in other cases, adding that the CFPB asserted that those amounts reasonably estimated damages. The judge said she would not accept that.

“The Court is not comfortable extrapolating from the anecdotal evidence provided by the Bureau without further evidence that the estimates are based on sufficient facts or data and drawn from the data based on reliable methods,” she wrote.

She said the bureau must supplement Kelly’s statements with more expert evidence to support the veracity of bureau estimates. “The Court will not direct the evidence to take any particular form, but at a minimum it must provide some basis within a reasonable degree of confidence that these flat amounts are representative of the classes of injuries consumers generally faced in this case,” the Judge concluded.