D.A.s Around the Country Are Taking A Cut From Collection Agencies - at Your Expense
"They make you feel like a criminal. They try scare tactics, harassment and everything. And you take a look and ask, 'Seriously, is the attorney general of Florida after me for a $14 bounced check?' "
- Michael O'Neil, who wrote two bad checks while living in Florida.
Amazing story. Basically, these District Attorney offices are renting out their name to deceptive bill collectors for bounced checks under $100. Think about it: You're so tight for money that you bounce a check under $100, you still have to pay all the bank fees AND you get slammed for $200+ in charges from this rent-a-cop collection agency? Nice, huh.
I always question the legal premise of anything like this I get in the mail, and you should, too:
DETROIT, Michigan (CNN) -- Michelle O'Neil and her husband Michael are young, scrambling to stay afloat financially and, by their own admission, not the best money managers.
Both acknowledge they wrote two bad checks, totaling about $200, as they were moving from Florida to Michigan in late 2007. The bad checks, they say, were mistakes. But nearly a year after they settled in a Detroit suburb, letters and phone calls followed from Florida.
"They told me they were part of the attorney general's office," Michelle O'Neil told CNN. "And that was scary in the sense that I've never had any legal problems. I'm a teacher."
But the calls weren't coming from a state agency. They were coming from a company hired by a Florida county prosecutor's office to collect on bounced checks.
The firm -- American Corrective Counseling Services, or ACCS -- splits the money it collects with the prosecutor's office. But it also makes money from financial management courses that people who wrote the checks are required by law to attend at their own expense. And the company's contract with the prosecutor's office states those classes are its "principal business activity."
The $14 check Michael O'Neil wrote to a Florida drugstore ended up costing him $285, including the $160 class fee.
O'Neil said he and his wife tried to make good on the checks with the merchants involved and pay any fees required. But he said the companies told him it was too late -- they had turned the matter over to ACCS.
The couple had been in Michigan for 10 months before they got their first notice from the company, which warned that "the State Attorney will not discharge the report(s) of criminal activity against you until all program requirements, including attending class, have been met."
"They make you feel like a criminal," Michael O'Neil told CNN. "They try scare tactics, harassment and everything. And you take a look and ask, 'Seriously, is the attorney general of Florida after me for a $14 bounced check?' "
The short answer is yes. Prosecutors are outsourcing some of their bad-check collections to companies like ACCS.
But Jennifer Osborn, a California student who bounced a $92 check to her college bookstore, said the company's money-management class was useless to her.
"It was boring. It was pointless," Osborn told CNN.
Congress changed federal law in 2006 to allow district attorneys' offices to contract out bounced-check collections to private collection firms like ACCS. Prosecutors hire them as part of pre-trial diversion programs aimed at keeping people like the O'Neils from going to court, and in Florida, educational courses are required parts of those programs.
But the practice has drawn criticism from the consumer watchdog group Public Citizen, which has filed lawsuits in three states to stop it. Deepak Gupta, the group's chief attorney in Washington, said companies like ACCS are effectively "renting out the prosecutor's seal" to collect money on cases prosecutors would not otherwise pursue.
"ACCS doesn't really care about these classes, about teaching people how to balance their checkbooks," Gupta told CNN. "It's really about collecting their fees."
ACCS, based in San Clemente, California, says it has contracts with prosecutors' offices in 17 states. In court papers, it says its actions are reviewed and authorized by local prosecutors, and calls its classes "remarkably successful."
"Less than 2 percent of the persons who complete the course commit repeat bad check offenses," it states.
In Los Angeles County, the largest prosecutor's office with an ACCS contract, supervising attorneys say they have had no complaints about the firm. Assistant District Attorney Sharon Matsumoto told CNN that the contract helped the county collect on 80,000 bad checks, bringing in $2 million in 2008.
"This particular function is one that we can legally outsource to a company experienced in doing this," Matsumoto said.
But another metropolitan prosecutor said he was wary of private debt collection firms acting on behalf of law enforcement.
"I did not favor the concept of having some office outside of the DA's office that would make contact with the public, and those folks would not be employees of the district attorney's office," said Paul Howard, the district attorney for Fulton County, Georgia, which includes Atlanta. "I felt that there should be a level of accountability that the program did not present."
Very appropriate post right after the Madoff post.
American Justice to little guy: Give me whats in your checking account, NOW!
American Justice to the rich guy: Sure stay in that Penthouse, we'll bring you a chef too.
is intended to be a factual statement
Madoff bounces $50 billion and gets to keep his penthouse and his fortune. How many thieves who rob a 7-11 get to stay under house arrest? Yeah, not too many. Madoff and these DAs should be in jail eating dry baloney sandwiches and crapping on a seatless toilet in front of their fellow inmates.
Hopefully humanity will one day learn to be humane.
Steal a lot and they make you king."
--Bob Dylan.
"Parachutes are allowed in checked or carry-on baggage, but may not be worn in flight."
---Southwest Airlines
I've seen this in California. A letter from the Chief of the Oakland (or Alemeda?) Police department was sent to me to conduct a background check for a friend of mine. It was really from the Chief of Police. my friend was applying for a low-level casino job. I was just amazed, not sure if the Police Chief was moonlighting or using tax payer resources for additional and or personal revenue
I should charge for this, but I won't. If anyone trying to collect on a check gets on your phone, get their name company name and a call back number. Offer to call them right back. And do it. That way you have a path back to them.
Be polite. Offer to pay, but negotiate a lower price.
Go to your bank. Make them give you back the check fees. Go to your branch in person and talk to the manager. If the bank has ever fucked up your account in the past, be sure to remind them of that if they don't want to help.
If the collectors call a number you have asked them not to call you at, or call outside the legal hours of contact, call your state's AG office. It's illegal for collection agencies to pull crap, and if they do often enough, they can be banned from doing business in your state.
Follow up every complaint in writing.
I just got a letter today from the cable regulator in my area confirming I successfully spanked Comcast (nothing to do with collections, just bad behaviour toward me over a period of time). My reward? Reduced rates.
You can get past shit like this if you are cool calm and collected. No swearing. No name calling. Just "This is how it is..."
me-oww!
They count on people feeling so ashamed that they won't fight back, no matter how bad they treat them.
i heard bernie sanders tell a caller to thom hartmann last week, say that he was going to pursue usury laws... none too soon.
Right now I believe they are implemented at the state level. With some states having no "ceiling" for interest, thus demonstrating that the legislators in that state had no f*cking clue what the word "usury" means.
I wonder if that is the reason why so many credit cards are located in those flyby states?
I told my husband the day they passed that monstrosity it was only a matter of time before the ticking bomb blew and our economy went down the drain. Well the new bankruptsy act was the end of the uber capitalist republican system. The pigs at the top never realized the rest of the nation was living on CREDIT, not wages.
American wages are set at a level that services debt but does not pay it off. Hence we are all enslaved to the upper class who lives on passive income. It is their goal to keep this two tier system going.
I am enjoying watching the system collapse and I am not afraid at all. No worker should be afraid. We should just lay down our fight with each other and watch the upper class fall.
plenty of them backed that monstrosity. Biden if I remember was up to the gills with donations from Credit Card Cos.
We are equally screwed from both sides...
Like Carlin once said: "Bipartisan, usually means a bigger crook than usual is taking place"
Well put.
Corruption favors the wealthy.
25 bucks a bounced check. Thats the AVERAGE. So the $14 example in the story is not an outlier.
Good thing we're taking these master criminals off the street.
except when I make the mistake, I bring up the time they gave my acct to identity thieves and printed them up new checks with their addy on them, and didn't ask for my mothers maiden name which would have saved me hundreds of hours if they had followed their own rules, that charge goes away.
me-oww!
If they average $25 a check, then they don't pay well, since it must cost well below that $25 to collect the check, or at least that's probably what they tell the collectors.... then they make their money on the fees and classes.
but what if the DA's office did it themselves instead of farming it out: would it pay? Could they cover the costs of collection by the amount they didn't pay out to the agency? If they charged half in fees and classes compared to what the agency charges, it would probably still pay for itself.
Do they save any money at all in having a private agency do the collecting? Or is it something people believe without checking with reality?
just thinking out loud....
Never ask a company if you can send them the payment due after it has been sent to collection. They'll always tell you it's out of their hands and you have to take it to the collection agency and pay their fees. Don't do it.
Never pay a collection agency's fees, it only encourages them.
Just send the company the final payment due. Trust me, they'll tell you they won't accept your payment, but they'll cash the check. Once they've accepted the payment, when the collection agency calls, tell them the account is settled and let them chase their fee from the company.
When the collection agencies call; start crying and tell them that you are a reltive and that the person they are looking for just died in a car accident. Trust me; the person on the other end of the phone will run from the conversation. The company will just write the loss off as a debt.
The other one that is fun is to tell them that the person they are looking for just got sentenced to 20 years in the state pen for homocide.
Doesn't that risk putting a "death" flag on your records? And don't these flags have a way of propagating from one place to another like from credit bureaus to government agencies and beyond? Almost every employer in America now routinely runs a credit check prior to hiring anybody. Or, one day you’re in line to renew your driver's license, or go to purchase auto insurance and the clerk tells you: "Sorry, sir, according to our records, you're dead."
It's easy enough to check on a death. When someone dies owing money, then it falls on the estate to pay.
And they'll be able to find out who is and isn't in jail. Both situations are a matter of public record, and collectiors use public records all the time. They also skip trace, and share the info with other creditors.
They'll request a certified death certificate.
me-oww!
dead social security numbers. not hard to find. And if the social security thinks you are dead, it takes forever to convince them otherwise. But they need a death certificate for that.
me-oww!
The following site is by far the best site for consumers:
http://www.bendover.com/
You can learn how to handle scumball collevction agencies, the mortgage company, banks, credit card companies, and dozens of other parasites who feed on the blood of the workers.
We have outsourced both common decency, and common sense.
And yes, those changs in bankruptcy laws in 2005 led directly to this fiasco.
Bankruptcy was designed more to protect the lender than the borrower. But for these pigs, that wasn't enough. They passed legislation, written by the banks, to totally fuck the borrower no matter what.
Now, every time I read about how a borrower is mailing in their key's rather than trying to renegitiate futiley, I laugh. The sad thing is, these idiot's have taken the rest of us off of the cliff with them.
Greed, mixed with a heavy dose of 'stupid is, as stupid does...'
Fuck these people!
BTW, I'm unemployed right now. I would rather give blow-job's in Greyhound Stations than work for a collection agency - and I'm not even gay!
Me too... I shall not take a job at a collection agency, should I become a beggar in the meantime. Tho I am bisexual, so I guess the choice is easier to make. And yet, it says how low of station collection agencies are to me that I would rather take chances with STD's and car-less child molesters than to take a job harassing my fellow man and making people cry for a living. LOL
Then, outsource prisons.
What is it again that we make and do that makes us so special?? (/snark, sort of...)
"Parachutes are allowed in checked or carry-on baggage, but may not be worn in flight."
---Southwest Airlines
We owe people lots of money.
...of the pigs who work for collection agencies and the slimeballs who own the agencies.
It is time for personal accountability.
Refuse to talk to any collector until they mail you a copy of their drivers license with picture and their home telephone number so you can call and verify that you're not talking with someone who is using a phoney name.
We need an Internet site that will post the personal information on all those bastards.
privatizing the government... it's just going to cost more in the long run.
Only when the last tree has died
and the last river has been poisoned and the last fish has been caught
will we realize we cannot eat money.
I have been hounded twice by usury collectors for money I did not owe. The tactic these people were using was to get me to pay them off even though they knew they might have the wrong person. After several screaming matches, (I was never nice to these parasites), one collector told me that I had to send bank records to prove that I did not owe the money. She also had the nerve to get angry because I asked her if she had read the bible and if she knew her profession was directly against the word of Christ...and unamerican. The AG's office finally told that collection agency to back off when I informed them that the police would be called to intervene in a nasty fight if she came round, which she had threatend to do. What resources these people waste.
it was awful. The company was eventually fined and banned from doing business in this state, because of the months of harassment they visited upon my friend.
Someone got an order of checks with my friends phone number, closed the acct and wrote loads of checks, and that's all the collection agency was going by to insist it was my friend.
me-oww!
It's always struck me that when the government mandates something - money management classes, driving classes, auto insurance, etc - the government should also provide them. How does adding a layer of profit be anything but parasitic?
Let's all be sure and remember this when it comes time for "universal" health insurance.
damn straight
has many articles about the Fair Debt Collection Act, Telephone Solicitors Act and others.
With just a little research, you could become educated and fight back against collection scumbags, including tactics to remove their smears from your credit records, forever.
If you receive a threatening letter in the mail and it doesn't have a court date, just throw it in the trash. If the threatening letter does have a court date, go to court and tell them you're broke and set up a payment plan. If you get phone calls, just tell them to sue you, and they will go away.
I lived in southwest Florida for five years from 2002-2007 and that State loves making life hard for their working class. While my name wasn't given to an agency like this I did bounce a $27.50 check at a local supermarket once by about $4. My bank at the time was BoA and they charged me the $33 overdraft and returned the check to the supermarket. By the time all this had happened I moved and changed banks and never received the notice from the supermarket that I still owed them the money (and maybe should've been more vigilant in my bookkeeping but it was a $27 check). About a year later I was involved in a minor traffic collision and when the police came to take the information they ran my name, then told me to put my hands behind my back and cuffed me. Apparently the supermarket had sent the info the the county attorneys and they had a warrant issued for my arrest for bad checks. It was an ROR warrant so all they had to do was book me (which involved my first fingerprinting in my 40 years on this planet) and release me but since I was processed I was in the jail holding area for about 8 hours until they forced me to make my required phone call (just enter the code) and then released me. They had towed my car to an impound lot at a local towing yard the police had a deal with. It was literally 1 mile away from where I was booked and I was charged $220 for their towing fees supposedly (sure the local cops and that place had some break me off something sweet arrangement going). I also had to go to court three times (county attorneys fit each hearing into their busy schedules) until I stopped by the supermarket one day on a whim, they had the $27.50 charge on file, I paid it, and the next time I went to court the charges were dropped.
Needless to say I fled from Florida back to the NorthEast shortly thereafter.
...privatization of the court system. Why am I not surprised?
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