i've noticed this thing they do where, some small debt, $25 on a credit card, will be owed. maybe you move, like i did, forget to change addresses on that card. you get a phone call 5 years later, oh hello! how are you! we are xyz debt collection and you own 1000$. then they offer you a "deal" - ok, now you own $300. pay by x date or it will be $400. etc. and we'lll start charging interest. Had they just tracked you done in 1998, they maybe would have gotten 50...$100 out of you for interest and fees.
it's a real racket. The credit card company that originally held my debt sold it to the collection agency for a buck or 5, a fraction at any rate. The collection agency then sits on it for five years. where the hell else can you make that kind of payback. spend $5 in 2000. In 2005, chump pays you $300 so his credit doesn't suck hind tit. where else can you invest $5 and get $300 in 5 years (minus overhead you were gonna pay anyway)
I'm sure it's minor and doesn't account for all of that... but I've spoken to enough people about this abhorrent practice to know it happens often enough, nailing people whenever they have some relativelly small debt like this.
I asked the collection agency guy once how he could claim that they didn't know where i was for five years, much as the collection agency that recently contacted me for an overdue library fine from 1998 did in 2011.
I kno there are rules about forwarding such income/financial stuff. but really. if they wanted to find my ass, they could have. debt collection agencies are notorious right, so there must be a really good reason why they wait 5 - 12 years like that. it can't be because i was living on the downlow. It's not like they couldn't figure out where the hell I was for the last five year. Every catalog, junk mailer, spammer, etc. knew where to find me. Hell, i've had bounced mail from a temporary earthlink account get forwarded to me at a wholly different provider. it wasn't like I didn't fill out other credit apps, fill out change of address form, have a landline telephone. Oh no, ma'am. We had no idea where you were until you moved recently.
that's some Batshit insanity.
At 04:01 PM 1/17/2012, Doug Henwood wrote:
>By the way, there has been a lot of walking away from debt over the last
>few years. According to FDIC data, banks have written off about $150
>billion in credit card debt since 2008 - about 37% of the outstanding
>balance at the beginning of the period, or 22% of the most recent total.
>For mortgages, the numbers are smaller - about $102 billion, or 5% of the
>amount outstanding. That may not look so big, but the quarterly average is
>more than 11 times the historical (1990-2006) average. For credit cards,
>the charge-off rate is about 71% higher than the 1990-2006 average.
>
>Also, about 9% of outstanding mortgages are past due - more than 10 times
>the 1990-2006 average, and down only slightly from the peak in 2010.
>
>Doug
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