Castrillo v. National Debt Relief LLC, Case No. 3:26-cv-04481

Primary Source: View Original Complaint (PDF)

Facts as Alleged in the Complaint

The following is taken verbatim from the complaint filed in federal court. These are allegations; no finding of fact has been made.

The Parties

6. NATIONAL DEBT RELIEF LLC is a financial services company incorporated in New York with its principal place of business at 180 Maiden Lane, 28th Floor, New York, NY 10038. Defendant is a citizen of the state of New York for purposes of diversity jurisdiction.
7. Personal jurisdiction over Defendant is reasonable because Defendant maintains an active, ongoing presence in California; advertises its services to California residents at https://www.nationaldebtrelief.com/debt-relief/california/; the spam e-mail at issued was directed to Plaintiff in California; and because Defendant tracked Plaintiff in California.
8. This Court has subject matter jurisdiction of this action pursuant to the Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 (“CAFA”), 28 U.S.C. § 1332(d)(2), because: (i) there are 100 or more class members, (ii) there is an aggregate amount in controversy exceeding $5,000,000, exclusive of interest and costs, and (iii) there is at least minimal diversity because at least one Plaintiff and Defendant are citizens of different states. Indeed, based See Hypertouch, Inc. v. ValueClick, Inc., 192 Cal. App. 4th 805, 829-30 (Cal. Ct. App. 2d Dist. 2011) (Section 17529.5 “impos[es] strict liability on advertisers who benefit from (and are the ultimate cause of) deceptive e-mails”); Id. at 822 (Section 17529.5 “does not require the plaintiff to prove that it relied on the deceptive commercial e-mail message or that it incurred damages as a result of the deceptive message”); Id at 821 (“Section 17529.5 … does not include any ‘scienter’ or intent requirement”); Id. at 820 (“[S]ection 17529.5 does not require the plaintiff to show that the defendant actually made a false or deceptive statement…. [B]y its plain terms, the statute is not limited to entities that actually send or initiate a deceptive commercial e-mail, but applies more broadly to any entity that advertises in those emails.”; and Javier v. Assurance IQ, LLC, 649 F. Supp. 3d 891 (N.D. Cal. 2023), aff’d, 2024 WL 123456 (9th Cir. 2024) (holding that the California Invasion of Privacy Act applies to internet conduct). -3CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT upon publicly available information, the class is believed to include over 10,000 members and the amount in controversy is believed to exceed $100 million.
9. Venue is proper in this District because a substantial part of the events or omissions giving rise to the claim occurred in this District – specifically, many class members received the spam and were injured in this District.

Factual Allegations

11. Through its affiliate marketers like Wisdom Companies, NATIONAL DEBT RELIEF spams plaintiff and other class members relentlessly. As just one example, earlier this month received a spam e-mail from Defendant claiming to be official correspondence from the United States Government Department of Veterans Affairs. The spam had a forged header, spoofed domain, and deceptive subject line. The spam is attached hereto as Exhibit “A”.
12. NATIONAL DEBT RELIEF spammed Plaintiff from a server within the state of California from an address purporting to be the “Department_of VA_Records.” Confused, and believing that the e-mail was official communication from the Department of Veterans Affairs, Plaintiff opened the email and clicked on the link it contained. That link took her to the website www.veterandiscounts.live, which mimicked an official website of the United States government and which Plaintiff believed to be an official U.S. government website. That website contained links to a number of other websites including Defendant’s website, NATIONALDEBTRELIEF.COM. Still believing that she was following official government instructions, she was induced to click through and visit Defendant’s website.
13. But for the deceptive falsified and misleading header information, spoofed domain, and impersonation of the United States government, Plaintiff would not have opened the message or visited Defendant’s website. In this way, the spam directly caused -4CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT Plaintiff’s interaction with Defendant’s site, which was the intended result of the deceptive campaign.
14. The email’s metadata and embedded code reflect multiple indicia of spam evasion and deceptive marketing practices. The message was transmitted through a third- party bulk mailing service and routed with a sending IP that failed authentication checks, including DKIM failure and DMARC rejection, indicating spoofing. The email further employs layered tracking and obfuscation techniques, masking the true destination of hyperlinks and enabling user tracking. The body of the spam contains multiple invisible tracking pixels (1×1 images) designed to monitor recipient engagement without consent. Additionally, the sender uses a mismatched “From” and “Reply-To” configuration and routes messages through intermediary domains to obscure the true sender identity. Collectively, these technical characteristics demonstrate deliberate efforts to evade spam detection, conceal the sender’s identity, and surreptitiously track recipients.
15. The preceding is just a single example of the spam that Defendant sends to class members. Based on publicly available sources, it is believed that NATIONAL DEBT RELIEF is responsible for over 100,000 spam e-mails to Californians every year.
16. The spam identified above is an “Unsolicited Commercial e-mail advertisement” because plaintiff had no pre-existing relationship with Defendant and because the e-mail was initiated for the purpose of advertising or promoting the lease, sale, rental, gift offer, or other disposition of any property, goods, services, or extension of credit. See Bus. & Prof. Code § 17529.1(c). Likewise, Plaintiff has never given “direct consent” to receive commercial e-mail advertisements from Defendant or its marketing agents.
17. The above spam violates Bus. & Prof. Code § 17529.5(a)(2) because it comes from an e-mail purporting to be the “Department_of VA_Records” that is intended to fool recipients and tricked plaintiff into believing that it was official correspondence from the United States government. As shown above, the spoofed and falsified domain tricked plaintiff into engaging with the e-mail and visiting Defendant’s website to -5CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT investigate it. actually sent or authorized the email.
18. Likewise, nothing in the header permits a recipient to determine who The spam violates Bus. and Prof. Code § 17529.5(a)(3) because the subject line “Unclaimed Adjustment: Check your entitlement status” is literally false: there was no “unclaimed” adjustment nor any “entitlement” to anything, period. The spam goes from bad to worse by advising recipients that their “service records” have been “audited” and that they “must” access a secure portal to prevent their “benefits” from being suspended. In reality, the underlying offers are not government benefits at all, are not restricted to veterans, and are not newly released; they are generic commercial products or lead-generation offers that have been continuously marketed – that makes the core premise of the subject line false. association, fabricated novelty, and misleading characterization of ordinary commercial offers as “benefits” is not just misleading — it is materially deceptive, because it is specifically engineered to cause a reasonable recipient to believe the email concerns legitimate, time-sensitive government programs to which they may be entitled, when it is nothing of the sort.
19. When Plaintiff clicked This combination of false governmental the link directing her to NATIONALDEBTRELIEF.COM, it immediately became clear that the email’s representations were false and misleading. The website had no connection to veterans, was not affiliated with any government entity, and did not concern any legitimate “benefits” — let alone newly available or time-sensitive programs. Rather, the website marketed debt resolution services that were available to everyone, and had nothing at all to do with any government agency or veterans benefits. This stark disconnect confirms that the subject line was designed to deceive recipients into opening the email under the false belief that it concerned official or exclusive veteran benefits.
20. Further, the landing URL contained embedded tracking parameters that identify the traffic source and affiliate attribution. These tracking codes demonstrate that the click was routed through an affiliate marketing network and attributed to the Wisdom -6CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT companies, allowing NATIONAL DEBT RELIEF to compensate those entities for generating traffic and user engagement through the deceptive spam campaign. This confirms that the email was not informational or governmental in nature, but instead part of a coordinated, profit-driven lead generation scheme.
21. Although a plaintiff need not plead or prove actual damages to bring a claim under the statute, Plaintiff has in fact suffered concrete, particularized harm as a result of Defendant’s conduct. misleading offer; searching the WHOIS database to learn who the e-mail came from; incurred opportunity costs and lost productivity; and suffered depletion of device and network resources, including storage space, bandwidth usage on a metered data plan, and battery life.
22. Plaintiff spent valuable time and attention investigating the The unauthorized domain name, misleading headers and literally false subject line also invaded Plaintiff’s privacy and disrupted the ordinary use and enjoyment of Plaintiff’s email account, diminishing its value as a communication tool and necessitating additional filtering and security precautions. These injuries were directly caused by Defendant’s unlawful email and are redressable by statutory and injunctive relief.
23. Defendant has not established and implemented, with due care, practices and procedures reasonably designed to effectively prevent unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements. In fact, Defendant actively defies California law.
24. Going from bad to worse, after luring Plaintiff to its website NATIONALDEBTRELIEF.COM via misleading spam, Defendant illegally installed numerous tracking pixels (“Tracking Pixels”) on Plaintiff’s device that allow various de facto data brokers (including Google Analytics and Fingerprint Pro) to (1) intercept communications from Plaintiff and track Plaintiff across the internet and (2) use those communications to compile and sell deeply personal details about Plaintiff to the highest bidders. Defendant does this to everyone who it lures to its site. -7CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT
25. In short, Defendant has installed the Tracking Pixels to track signals generated by internet users (thus operating as a “Trap and Trace” device) to compile the dossiers described above and sell the information to the highest bidders. By doing so, Defendant has violated California Penal Code § 638.51.
26. The Tracking Pixels use algorithms to analyze internet and device data and predict whether two or more devices are owned by the same person. Participating websites and apps then cater their advertisements based on a collective knowledge of the user’s actions across all of their devices. The Tracking Pixels use data such as cookie IDs, operating system IDs, IP addresses, online registrations, and data from partnering publishers to develop a probability that different devices are shared by the same person.
27. The Tracking Pixels are used for advertising to consumers across devices, where a user is shown an ad on their mobile or tablet device based on websites they visited on a desktop. For example, if an Android phone visits a website shortly after a desktop PC from the same home network, the Tracking Pixels will assess that there is a high probability that the two devices are operated by the same person and will show them similar ads on both devices. The Tracking Pixels also use cross-device analytics for things like location, timing, user behavior, and audience analysis.
28. The Tracking Pixels spyware activities described above are known as “fingerprinting.” Put simply, the Tracking Pixels collect as much data as it can about otherwise anonymous visitors to Defendant’s website and matches it with existing information that the Tracking Pixels have acquired and accumulated about hundreds of millions of Americans.
29. According to the esteemed Brennan Center for Justice, data brokers are “the main purveyors of surveillance capitalism” that “collect, assemble, and analyze personal information to create detailed profiles of individuals, which they then sell to “financial institutions and insurance firms…Advertising companies… predatory loan companies, stalkers, and scammers…foreign actors…and law enforcement and other government -8CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT agencies including the FBI and the IRS.”). See https://www.brennancenter.org/our- work/research-reports/closing-data-broker-loophole (last accessed May 2026).
30. After receiving the deceptive spam, Plaintiff visited the Website to investigate and was unaware of the secret spyware being used to surveil her and other visitors and monetize their personal information.
31. The Tracking Pixels (1) begin to collect information the moment a user lands on the NATIONALDEBTRELIEF.COM website before any pop-up or cookie banner advises users of the invasion or seeks their consent; and (2) request and transmit other identifying personal information to link a user’s behavior on Defendant’s website to the visitor’s social media accounts and other devices. IV.

Remedies Sought

• For an order certifying that the action be maintained as a class action, that
• For all available declaratory, legal, and equitable relief including injunctive relief;
• For statutory damages;
• For punitive damages;
• For attorneys’ fees and costs as allowed by law; and
• For any and all other relief at law or equity that may be appropriate.

Frequently Asked Questions

Has Defendant been found liable in this case?

No. This is a complaint — a legal filing that contains allegations made by Plaintiff. Defendant has not been found liable for any wrongdoing. A finding of liability requires a court proceeding where evidence is presented and evaluated by a judge or jury.

What is the current status of this case?

This case was recently filed. See the CourtListener docket linked at the bottom of this page for the complete filing record. This page is updated automatically when new documents are filed.

Where can I read the full complaint against Defendant?

The full complaint is publicly available on CourtListener. The Facts as Alleged section above reproduces the complaint’s factual allegations verbatim. The complete case record, including all filings, is available through the docket link at the bottom of this page.

Source: CourtListener. Information on this page is taken verbatim from the court complaint. These are allegations only; no finding of fact has been made.