--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote: > Date: Wed, 18
Apr 2001 14:09:21 -0500
> From: Maureen Anderson <manders at uchicago.edu>
>
> >U.S. Student loans are not dischargeable through bankruptcy,
> default, attack
> >by space aliens, meteors hitting the planet, or anything
> else. They -will-
> >track you down.
>
> Okay, but speaking _purely hypothetically_, and not in the
> _least_
> soliciting professional advice, what's to keep someone with
> huge
> student loan debt from paying it off with the even huger
> credit limit
> on her or his credit cards, and _then_ declaring bankkruptcy?
An interesting hypothetical, but speaking as a banker of sorts, I would think that this hypothetical person would need to be coming up with a convincing-sounding story about how he/she didn't have any mens rea but happened to arrange his/her finances in this manner (which is incredibly convenient for someone intending to declare bankruptcy but blindingly silly otherwise), just before declaring bankruptcy. Otherwise, you're talking about whatever the personal equivalent is of wrongful trading, which in the UK can and does put you in jail.
Taking on a debt without intending to pay it back is fraud.
If a decent interval had passed between the two events, and if some evidence of having attempted to pay off the credit card debt had been shown, and (importantly) if that person hadn't floated the idea on a publicly archived mailing list as a scheme for burning one's creditors, I can see a situation in which they *might just* get away with it. But the risks on the other side are pretty heavy. You'd have to rely on the credit card company not investigating too closely which, when looking at wearing a loss of student-loan proportions, they would.
Bottom line: if you're in the mind for a fraud, you might as well go for the gusto and try something bigger than this tupenny-hapenny stuff. I hear that salad oil's still sucking 'em in and my masterclass is quite cheap ...
dd
===== ... in countries which do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. -- Bertrand Russell
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