Posted on 11/18/2014 8:36:14 PM PST by Olog-hai
The country is facing an epidemic of unscrupulous debt collectors willing to pose as law enforcement and threaten arrest to squeeze dollars out of Americans, a top prosecutor said Tuesday as he announced the arrests of seven people who worked for an Atlanta-area company.
U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said the abusive practices have become so widespread that even a top FBI official in New York City got a call.
“This has become something of an epidemic,” Bharara told a news conference.
He described the workers at the defunct Williams, Scott & Associates LLC in Norcross, Georgia, as “ruthlessly persistent” as they badgered people in all 50 states from 2009 through April, collecting more than $4 million from over 6,000 victims. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
they are talking about the IRS...correct?
People who owe money they borrowed on good faith are now victims?
As is done with deadbeat African countries, debt forgiveness for domestic deadbeats is on it’s way! I’m sure this is just the opening salvo for the dems next crusade for just-us.
I know of one company who abuses lax Florida laws. They buy a 25 year old debt which cannot be legally collected, mail the person a couple of threatening letters then file suit in their county using the mail and telephone.
The person is generally poor, can’t afford a lawyer and don’t show up for the telephone call at the judge’s secretaries office and they automatically are given a totally illegal judgement. Some of the blame clearly goes on the Judge who allows this without taking the trouble to find out if the debt is even legal.
When the person dies, the judgement collects from their estate.
The company is Portfolio Recovery and the feds could not find a better company to go after.
It seems, in this day and age, everybody is a potential victim. This is not your “I’m general so-and-so from Nigeria and could you help me get my money out of the country” scam. Now it is big time.
Its all about "leveling the field" , and "income inequity "(previously known as jealousy)
so that we can all enjoy the misery !
Yeah...just wait until that army of 16,000 new IRS agents starts setting their hooks into American citizens who refuse to bow down before the State. Then we’ll really see some “unscrupulous debt collectors.”
people interested in this issue should read this primer
on how debt collectors work.
it is called ‘Bad Paper’
and is reviewed by the NYT.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/15/magazine/bad-paper-debt-collector.html?_r=0
I give up, who has sympathy
for debt collectors?
As long as they don’t need to be strictly accountable they will do this.
The worst of them will even resort to outright fraud. There are numerous examples of these companies suing people for debt that never existed. When not outright fraudulent, their records are frequently incomplete or of very dubious accuracy.
This industry is really a swamp that needs to be drained. Their mass filing of lawsuits is clogging the county and district courts, and their filing of suits with little or no evidence borders on perpetrating fraud upon the court system.
Don't confuse this with original creditors who are legitimately owed by debtors, and for whom repayment would equal restitution. These bottom feeders have very little if any skin in the game and are essentially gamblers looking to the courts to deliver unearned jackpots to them.
In many cases, we aren’t talking about people who incurred the debt. These debt collectors go after anyone who they can find with any relationship to the phone number or address that the debtor gave.
We had Verizon file a judgement against us for six months of phone service on an old phone number, when we weren’t even Verizon customers when we had that number and the house that we were living in had been torn down.
A friend of mine had judement against them for a cell phone contract that her husband’s 21 year old son had when he died in PA! When my friends live on the west coast. My friends father was noncustodial.
It’s also a weapon that his used to harass both private parties and businesses.
I was targeted by unions for some of my political opposition to a coal terminal in our county, and one of the ploys they used was to forward collection calls from legitimate debtors to my number. Then they would change the time zone for the automated call in the computer to make the phone ring in the middle night. I would get a call once an hour, all night long. I know how they did it because I did a redial and finally got a manager on the phone who was tired of the problems. He got into the computer and cleaned it up, but most of the large collection agencies aren’t so cooperative.
When my mother pasted several years ago I started getting calls from debt collectors. What they didn’t know was that she was under our families care for many years and could not have incurred the debt.
It was a complete scam from unscrupulous people. She had no control over her financial decisions. They just read the obituaries and started calling, expecting to get money from the family, for credit card purchases that were not legitimate.
Just get in a car accident where a police report was filed and count the number of lawyers that call inquiring about whether or not you were injured.
Like I said earlier, when challenged these people almost always dismiss their own lawsuits because they know they cannot prove their claims. That speaks volumes regarding their illegitimacy. Also, keep in mind that if someone does pay one of these companies they are not making restitution in any way for their delinquent original debt. The debtor never had a contract with these people, and the original creditor with whom they did have an agreement has written off the debt and moved on. Paying these third party clowns only serves to unduly enrich them and does nothing to compensate the company that the debtor actually owed.
When they were going after me for the Verizon bill, I kept telling them that I was not a Verizon customer at that time and they said, prove it. I said, look this is not a very big bill, I could easily pay it to get you off my back, but I refuse because I don’t owe it. They finally switched the account to another young girl who kept trying to get me to get proof from the people who owned the house, then I told her that it was a water front house and that the front window had blown in during a storm and that the whole house was torn down when we moved out,. I told her to go find someone else to hang the bill on.
If you are being harassed by one of these woodpeckers (I wrote ‘bloodsuckers’ but this works), search ‘Fair Debt Collection Practices’ act.
There may be a form letter on one of the sites that allows you to put the BSer on notice that you demand “verification of the debt”.
They really hate the FDCPA. Be able to show violations and it’s a $1,000.00 per violation by the woodpecker.
age does not stop them from trying to collect in most states (some states DO have a drop dead statute that makes it uncollectiable, but I am talking about the rest)..
There is just a time window for court action. Even then, it is up to the defendant to know, and exercise their rights in the law about the debt being past the Statute of limitations. Or, SOL. They can sue, and win on a debt past SOL if no one brings up the SOL defense. (or fails to show up at all).
As a begrudging admirer of fleas and ticks, I will go so far as sympathy for debt collectors.
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