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Debt Buyer Lawsuits
The wrath of corporate greed and complete lack of
respect for the average American Consumer that we hear
so much about on the news today gave birth to an animal
that will stop at nothing to maximize its profits at
your expense – The Debt Buyer. Unfortunately, the Debt
Buyer has turned our civil court system into its own
private casino. There’s a good chance that if you have
been harassed over a debt or sued by a debt collector
Plaintiff with whom you have never even heard of before,
you’ve become the target of a Debt Buyer.
What is a Debt Buyer? In the consumer world, Debt Buyers
are typically corporate entities that buy large
portfolios of charged off consumer credit obligations,
like credit card accounts, for pennies on the face-value
dollar. The Debt Buyer often then attempts to achieve a
windfall return on its investment by suing and forcing
unsophisticated, unrepresented individuals into
settling, or by getting judgments against consumers who
fail to respond to the lawsuit, called "Default
Judgments." Either result can be catastrophic to the
consumer. A Default Judgment is a conclusion by the
Court that you owe the Debt Buyer the money, and now the
Debt Buyer will probably try to collect and may garnish
(i.e. deplete) your bank accounts and "Abstract" the
Judgment, which may cloud title to real estate that you
own. Settling with a debt buyer who probably would not
have been able to prove its case at trial can be equally
as bad – your hard earned money now belongs to them, and
they never proved, in a Court of Law, that you owed them
a dime, which would have been their burden had the
lawsuit been properly defended.
The Truth About Debt Buyers and Debt Buyer Lawsuits
The largest and most
successful Debt Buyers have purchased hundreds of bad
debt portfolios containing millions of charged off
accounts. You’re merely a number to them. They run high
volume operations, employ lots of collectors and debt
collection law firms, and file lots of lawsuits.
Typically, the less a Debt Buyer pays for a portfolio of
charged off debt, the less documentation and support
from the original creditor they receive. This works to
your advantage if you are represented by a diligent
lawyer intent on holding the Debt Buyer to their
evidentiary burden under the law.
It also means that it is financially advantageous for
the Debt Buyer to buy cheaper portfolios and then
concentrate on a quick and aggressive attempt to collect
after serving you with the lawsuit versus a litigation
strategy designed to go to trial. The more people they
sick their aggressive debt collectors and debt collector
lawyers on, the more money they make. However, there is
hope. It has been my experience that once the layers of
the onion are peeled back during the discovery period of
the lawsuit and the Debt Buyer's evidence is examined
closely, very few Debt Buyer lawsuits have admissible
evidence capable of proving their case at trial. Rather,
the Debt Buyer Plaintiffs have adopted a systematic and
routine practice of producing and attaching documents to
their lawsuits that look official, but have nothing to
do with the consumer. By way of example, I have seen
Debt Buyer lawsuits with credit card account agreements
attached that are from the wrong bank. I have seen
multiple "Account Statements" that were manufactured by
the Debt Buyer themselves, which is troubling since Debt
Buyers do not open or maintain credit accounts with
consumers. The simple truth of the matter is that Debt
Buyers often times lack the ability to produce the
records needed to succeed at trial; or for that matter,
the records simply don’t exist.
Unsophisticated and unrepresented consumers who are not
aware of these facts are often times tricked into
financial distress at the hands of the Debt Buyer. Don’t
become one of them. |
