Tens of thousands of debtors will get to pursue as a class action claims that they were forced into default by process servers who never delivered their papers, a divided federal appeals court decided Tuesday.

Two judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit agreed that a lower court was right to certify classes alleging the widespread practice of “sewer service”—the intentional failure to serve a summons and complaint on a debtor by throwing the papers in the “sewer” and then obtaining a default judgment in the New York City Civil Court.

The cases claim the law firm of Mel Harris and Associates in Lower Manhattan engaged in a massive debt collection scheme with the debt-buying company Leucadia National Corp. and the Brooklyn-based process serving agency Samserv.