robo-sign rubber stamp

courts fail?

bondi? tfg

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ab 11 24

Aside from her willingness to help President-elect Donald Trump prosecute his political opponents, Attorney General-designate Pam Bondi is also known for accommodating any potential lawbreakers who write big checks.

In a Wednesday essay, Bloomberg columnist Mary Ellen Klas called attention to Bondi's record as Florida's attorney general, in which she showed a pattern of pulling back on prosecuting campaign donors and prioritizing fundraising over her official duties. Klas also argued that Bondi's "blind allegiance" to President-elect Donald Trump raises "serious credibility issues" that should give senators pause during her confirmation process next year.

"Simply put: Bondi has never demonstrated a commitment to protecting average people, and that’s where the danger lies," Klas wrote.

One example of Bondi's ability to be swayed by campaign cash was in her office's abrupt decision to stop investigating Trump's fraudulent "get rich quick" seminars that he dubbed "Trump University." While the New York Attorney General's Office was investigating claims of fraud in 2013, Bondi hinted that she may join their investigation.

But as watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington explained, that changed after the Trump Foundation made an illegal $25,000 contribution to a PAC backing Bondi's reelection campaign (non-profit organizations are prohibited from making political donations) that she personally solicited. Trump was eventually forced to shut down both his seminar course and his foundation after New York forced him to pay fraud victims $25 million, but he never had to be investigated in Florida. Bondi kept the $25,000, and Trump later threw a private fundraiser for her at Mar-a-Lago.

As Klas described, Trump was "not the only donor to benefit from Bondi’s influence during her eight years as AG." The Bloomberg columnist noted that Bondi "helped developers facing allegations of timeshare fraud, ended her office’s practice of representing consumers when utility companies sought rate increases and shielded banks and lenders during the mortgage foreclosure crisis."

"In one particularly egregious example, Bondi ended an investigation into a company that helped banks and lending firms by concocting false evidence to kick families out of their homes without due process. Two investigators in the previous attorney general’s office had uncovered the wrongdoing and built a case against it but, after Bondi took office in 2011, that all changed," she wrote. "Instead of going after the fraudsters central to Florida’s foreclosure fraud scandal, Bondi’s office went after the investigators. They had stellar job reviews, but were forced to resign.According to journalist David Dayen, executive editor of American Prospect, Bondi received substantial campaign contributions from the firm under investigation."

Click here to read Klas' column in full (subscription required).

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/debt-collectors-have-made-a-fortune-this-year-now-theyre-coming-for-more/

Earlier this year, the pandemic swept across the country, killing 100,000 Americans by the spring, shuttering businesses and schools, and forcing people into their homes. It was a great time to be a debt collector.

In August, Encore Capital, the largest debt buyer in the country, announced that it had doubled its previous record for earnings in a quarter. It primarily had the CARES Act to thank: The bill delivered hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stimulus checks and bulked-up unemployment benefits to Americans, while easing pressures on them by halting foreclosures, evictions and student loan payments. There was no ban on collections of old credit card bills, Encore's specialty.

At the same time, the pandemic compelled households to cut spending. Finding themselves with enough money to settle old debts, people responded to collectors' calls and letters. Debt-buying executives couldn't help marveling at their good fortune. All this created “a perfect storm from a cash perspective," the CEO of Portfolio Recovery Associates, Encore's main competitor, told Wall Street analysts.

After its record second quarter, analysts expect Encore to blow past $200 million in profit this year and reward stockholders with 40% earnings growth compared with last year. Portfolio Recovery is set for similar growth. The share prices of both have soared off their early April lows.

Investors didn't even show much concern when, in early September, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Encore,saying that it had broken the terms of a consent agreement struck in 2015.**:{The agency had previously charged the company with “pressuring consumers with false statements and churning out lawsuits using :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{robo-signed court documents:(style="background-color:#ff0000;"):}::{," as it :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{:(style="transition-property:color, background, opacity;background-color:#ffffff;;transition-property:color, background, opacity"):}:**said at the time. (Ina statement, Encore said the CFPB's recent suit was unnecessary because it had fixed the alleged problems “years ago.")

In recent months, the only real bad news for debt buyers was that local courts across the country temporarily shut down. Debt collection lawsuits provide a key source of revenue for the companies, a way to extract payment from consumers, typically low-income, who don't offer it up.

But now even that hiccup is over. After a bit of a lull in the spring, Encore and other debt buyers are back at it, filing suits by the thousands every week, according to ProPublica's analysis of state court filings.

In August alone, Encore filed about 1,000 suits in Indiana and over 2,000 suits in the metro Atlanta area. Other debt buyers jumped back in as well. In Chicago, Portfolio Recovery filed over 3,000 suits in July, while LVNV, a major debt buyer privately owned by Sherman Financial Group, filed over 2,700 suits in Maryland in August. For all these companies, ProPublica found, thevolume was well above the number they'd filed before the coronavirus arrived, in January or February of this year. No national numbers on suits exist.

In statements, the companies said they have been actively working with consumers during the COVID-19 pandemic and only sue as a last resort on a small portion of accounts.

Elizabeth A. Kersey, a spokesperson for Portfolio Recovery, said the company's hardship program “allows for the suspension of collection efforts for ninety (90) days upon notification of a hardship event." The company is currently not seeking new orders to seize debtors' wages or bank account funds, she said.

Ryan Bell, an Encore executive, said, “We have consistently and proactively communicated to consumers the various relief options we've put in place in response to COVID-19, including temporarily stopping collections." The company said it had stopped seeking orders to garnish bank accounts. It is, however, seizing wages.

Sherman Financial did not respond to requests for comment.

If Congress is unable to pass any further stimulus , unemployment is likely to remain high. In that scenario, debt buying companies and the banks that sell defaulted accounts to them expect more Americans to fall behind on their credit card bills over the coming months.

Even that scenario turns out to be rosy for the debt buyers. While good times can mean that Encore collects on more debt than it expected, bad times typically bring a glut of people suffering under loans they cannot repay. The result is that Encore can scoop up the raw materials for its profit machine — defaulted accounts — more cheaply. Or as Encore CEO Ashish Masih put it to Wall Street: The company is “particularly excited about the prospects for increased supply in the future."

“The same giant debt buyers known for fighting consumer protection laws at every turn have been raking in cash during this pandemic," Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, told ProPublica. “They are now licking their chops in anticipation of profiting even more off families who have their hours further cut or can't find a job, and can't keep up with their bills or their mortgage. This is disgraceful and reinforces the need for Congress to protect consumers and small businesses from this predatory behavior."

In recent years, Encore has bought around 2 million to 3 million U.S. accounts per year, according to public filings. Last year, on average, the company paid 8.6 cents on the dollar for each account. For a typical debt of $3,142, Encore paid $271.

To earn a profit on that investment, Encore and other debt buyers pursue debtors in near perpetuity. Encore is still collecting tens of millions of dollars each year from debts it bought in 2009 or earlier. The key to that persistence is the courts.

Since the early 2000s, debt buyers have flooded local courts nationwide with suits. The companies regularly account for more than a quarter of all debt collection cases in a given jurisdiction, according to ProPublica's review of collection filings over several states.

That disproportionate presence has been particularly apparent in recent months, as the banks themselves have mostly opted to suspend filing new suits. In normal times, Capital One files far more lawsuits than other banks, in numbers similar to those filed by Encore and Portfolio Recovery. But since March, although Capital One continued to seize pay via garnishments secured before COVID-19 struck, it has largely stopped filing new suits.

ProPublica did find one exception among the major banks that commonly file a significant number of suits: Citigroup, which resumed filing suits at its normal levels in July. The bank, for instance, filed over 200 suits in Oklahoma in August, more than it had filed there in January and February combined.

In a statement, Citi spokesperson Jennifer Bombardier said the bank has a special assistance program for customers impacted by COVID-19 and that it is not seeking to garnish the bank accounts of customers it has sued. The bank also did not sell charged-off accounts to debt buyers “for up to 120 days" in the states “most impacted by COVID-19," she said....

https://www.salon.com/2015/03/22/vulture_capitalists_are_picking_us_dry_why_consumer_debt_buyers_are_on_the_rise_partner/

no lnx

Vulture capitalists are picking us dry: Why consumer debt buyers are on the rise

The great recession laid waste to the U.S. economy. Now debt collectors are feasting on the carrion

JIM HIGHTOWER

MARCH 22, 2015

Good news, people: The "boom" is back! Yes, good times are here again, thanks to an economic boom that's being generated by (of all things) bad times.

As you might know from your own experiences, tens of millions of Americans have been hit hard, knocked down and held down in recent years by the collapse of jobs and wages. This calamity has led to a second blow for millions of the same families, who find themselves suddenly buried in piles of overdue bills for credit card charges, student loans and other consumer debt.

But the good news is that there's a bright silver lining in that dark financial cloud. Only, it's not for the indebted families, but for a booming breed of finance hucksters known as consumer debt buyers. Believe it or not, in the warped world of high finance,"There's gold in them thar hills" of bad debt, and where there's gold, there are diggers.

Whenever a corporation issues a statement declaring that it's committed to "treating consumers fairly and with respect," chances are, it's not.

After all, why say such a thing, when actually practicing it would make a statement unnecessary? Indeed, with names like Encore Capital Group and Sherman Financial, these miners of human misery buy bales of these unpaid bills from banks and other lenders, paying pennies on the dollar. Then they unleash packs of their hard-nosed, aggressive collectors on the families. If they still can't extract payment, the corporate debt profiteers turn to their meanest dog: The courts.

Debt firms routinely file thousands of lawsuits a day against financially devastated Americans. They know that most debtors can't understand the legal gibberish filed against them, can't afford a lawyer, can't take time off to go to a court hearing and can't mount an effective defense against the corporate lawyers. So, some 95 percent of these lawsuits produce default judgments against hapless borrowers -- meaning debt buyers can then confiscate the wages of borrowers or freeze their bank accounts.

This boom in vulture capitalism is disgusting -- but, worse, it's subsidized by us taxpayers! We pay for the judicial system -- the judges, courtrooms and endless rounds of hearings. Predatory debt corporations have perverted our so-called justice system into their own subsidiary for squeezing profits out of destitute debtors.

This is why New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has started going after these for-profit corporate debt collectors. He found that Encore, based in San Diego, filed nearly 240,000 lawsuits against debtors in a recent four-year period, using the courts as its private collection arm. Problem is, Encore's bulk filing of lawsuits against the hard-pressed borrowers are rife with errors, out-of-date payment data, fabricated credit card statements, etc. With debt buyers scooping up millions of overdue bills each year from lenders, tons of them are missing original loan documents, payment histories and other proof of debt.

Debt predators, however, scoot around this lack of facts by simply having their employees sign affidavits asserting that the level of money owed is accurate. Judges, overwhelmed by the unending flood of lawsuits filed by Encore et al, have accepted those affidavits as true, thus ruling in favor of the corporations. But Schneiderman found that -- Surprise! -- affidavits were simply being rubber-stamped by company employees, with no effort to ensure the truth of the information. An employee of one large debt-buyer testified that his corporation ran an assembly-line scheme in which he signed about 2,000 affidavits a day.

This is no minor scam -- 1 in 7 adults in the U.S. is under pursuit by debt collectors. It's hard enough for struggling families to claw their way out from under the economic crash without having lying, cheating predator corporations twist the court system to pick their pockets and shut off their hope of recovery.

JIM HIGHTOWER

Jim Hightower's most recent book is "Let's Stop Beating Around the Bush." He produces a monthly newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, and a syndicated daily radio commentary.