The debt buying industry and its proponents claim that a thriving market in delinquent debts actually benefits consumers. Debt buyers allow original creditors to.

US Courts, Debt Buying Corporations, and the Poor. Watch Descent 4Shared there. Summary. Every year, several hundred thousand people across the United States are sued by companies they have never done business with and may never have heard of. These firms are called debt buyers and although they have never loaned anyone a penny, millions of Americans owe them money. Debt buyers purchase vast portfolios of bad debts—mostly delinquent credit cards—from lenders who have written them off as a loss. They pay just pennies on the dollar but can go after alleged debtors for the full face value of every debt plus interest at rates that routinely exceed 2. Debt buyers also rely on tax- funded state institutions—namely the court system—to secure much of their income. Leading debt buyers rank among the heaviest individual users of state court systems across the US, and various legal actions and research, including that of Human Rights Watch, have identified repeated patterns of error and lack of legal compliance in their lawsuits.

These problems are often discovered long after the debt buyers have already won court judgments against alleged debtors, a situation that arises because of the inability of alleged debtors to mount an effective defense even when they are on the right side of the law. Debt buyer lawsuits typically play out before the courts with a stark inequality of arms, pitting unrepresented defendants against seasoned collections attorneys. The amount at issue in any one debt buyer lawsuit rarely exceeds a few thousand dollars, but the stakes are often higher than they seem. Many of the defendants in these cases are poor or living at the margins of poverty and this is often the reason they fell into debt in the first place.

For them, the impact of an adverse judgment can be devastating. Human Rights Watch interviewed alleged debtors in court who broke down in tears while trying to explain how the judgments debt buyers had won against them would impact their ability to pay bills and support their children. None of this means that debt buyers and other creditors should not be able to enforce their claims in court, but it does mean that courts have clear and compelling reasons to handle debt buyer litigation with a particular degree of vigilance. This report describes how many courts do exactly the opposite, treating debt buyer lawsuits with passive credulity so that their imprimatur is reduced to little more than a rubber stamp. And in addition to smoothing the way for the corporate plaintiffs, many courts have erected formidable obstacles for unrepresented defendants who simply want to have their day in court.

Directed by Arthur Allan Seidelman. With Forrest, Ellen Burstyn, Judge Reinhold, Mark Hamill. An elderly widow befriends an orphaned juvenile delinquent. Designer Leticia has a house full of action. While she has a lover, her worker Kim seduces the plumber and the maid. Directed by Yasuharu Hasebe. Watch Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie`S Island Adventure Download Full. With Akiko Wada, Meiko Kaji, Kôji Wada, Tatsuya Fuji. A wandering tough biker girl aids a female delinquent gang in their battles.

These courts risk complicity in damaging the rights of poor people entitled to fair administration of justice and equitable proceedings, and are putting their own integrity at risk. The scale of the debt buying industry is hard to overstate. Leading firm Encore Capital claims that one in every five US consumers either owes it money or has owed it money in the past. While a relative handful of large firms dominate the business, there are hundreds and perhaps thousands of companies buying up delinquent debts across the US at any given point in time. Leading debt buyers collect about half of their revenue by suing alleged debtors in court. Encore and one of its leading competitors, Portfolio Recovery Associates, collected a combined total of more than $1 billion through hundreds of thousands of lawsuits in 2.

In New York State, Encore filed more lawsuits than any other civil plaintiff that year, with Portfolio coming in third. Eight of New York’s 2. Many debt buyer lawsuits rest on a foundation of highly questionable information and evidence. Debt buyers do not always receive meaningful evidence in support of their claims when they purchase a debt, and in some cases the sellers explicitly refuse to warrant that any of the information they passed on is accurate or even that the debts are legally enforceable. Enormous accumulations of interest—often in excess of 2. The lawsuits themselves are then often generated largely by automated process without meaningful scrutiny by any human.

The predictable result of all this is that debt buyer lawsuits are sometimes riddled with fundamental errors. Debt buyers have sued the wrong people, sued debtors for the wrong amounts, or sued to collect debts that had already been paid. In other cases they have filed lawsuits that were barred by the applicable statutes of limitations or were otherwise legally deficient. There have been multiple allegations, some which have led to successful legal cases, that some debt buyer attorneys fail to serve defendants notice of the suits against them in order to obtain large volumes of uncontested judgments. While industry representatives and their critics differ over the prevalence of these problems, their existence is not in serious dispute.

Leading debt buyers have settled numerous lawsuits and enforcement actions alleging errors and legal flaws, and the settlement agreements have forced them to throw out tens of thousands of unfounded judgments they had won against consumers. The debt buying industry has attracted a significant degree of media and regulatory scrutiny in recent years.

It has also aroused the very public ire of some law enforcement and regulatory officials. New York’s attorney general has publicly condemned debt buyers who “abuse” the power of the courts at the expense of “hardworking families.” These are stirring words, but the problem with statements like these is that they cast the courts as a second set of victims when in reality they bear direct responsibility for allowing abuses to take root and proliferate. When debt buyer lawsuits result in unjust and financially disastrous outcomes for poor families, the courts’ own failures and shortcomings are often directly responsible. Fundamental problems with debt buyer lawsuits often come to light only after the companies have already won judgments they were never entitled to, in courts that never asked them to present any meaningful evidence in support of their claims. This report describes the many ways courts across the US fail to stand up for the rights of disadvantaged defendants in debt buyer lawsuits, or put those defendants’ sophisticated corporate adversaries to their burden of proof. It also describes the devastating impact these failures can have on families who are struggling at the margins of poverty. While new regulatory efforts at the federal level offer some hope of better policing the industry, the federal government can do little to address the shortcomings of state court systems.

The rights of defendants will remain under threat until they reform their practices as well. In the large majority of consumer credit lawsuits—including debt buyer cases—alleged debtors fail to mount a defense to the case against them, sometimes because they never receive proper notice of the suit.

Many courts routinely award default judgments to debt buyers in these cases without scrutinizing the claims at issue. One Arizona justice of the peace aptly described this to Human Rights Watch as a “greased rail” process.

Many individual courts issue thousands or even tens of thousands of no questions asked default judgments in favor of debt buyers every year. Some judges routinely enter hundreds of default judgments for debt buyers in the space of just a few hours. One judge told Human Rights Watch that he does this at home while relaxing on a Sunday afternoon. When defendants do attempt to defend themselves in court, they are badly outclassed by their opponents.

The plaintiffs are often large corporations represented by top- tier collections attorneys. By contrast, hardly any of the defendants in debt buyer lawsuits have legal representation and many are largely unaware of their rights.

Rather than try to mitigate this imbalance, many courts greatly exacerbate it.

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