A BILL COLLECTORS NEW WEAPON

A Curse to Society

By Victor M Adamus

I don’t even know if this is legal or not.  Reader be warned.  If you’re behind in your bills check and see if it’s legal in your state. 

According to a cancer victim who is a year behind in her credit card bills, she’s now getting calls from neighbors and family asking why bill collectors are calling them, asking them to call her to ask her to call them.  How embarrassing, you may think.  Well it’s true.  Bonnie writes that when her Chemo treatments were no longer working, no other cure available, she faced her end of life scenario and figured to pay off her delinquent debts it was time to put the house on the market.  It was all she had left having gone through her savings, cashed out her retirement, sold one of her cars, and was down to advertising her china and what nots just to make money for utility bills.  She gave her dog of six years to a friend.

The credit card companies handed her delinquent bills off to a collection agency which roto-dialed her cell phone number daily and flooded her mailbox with threats of legal action.  In her condition she neither felt they had time to take her to court, nor could she afford an attorney.  She would appear before a judge and say she has no money and is dying of cancer and that would be a judgment that would one day go un-collectable.  Paid in full if her house sold.

The story would end here but for the fact that her bill collectors paid to access a legal database called LexisNexis.  This company holds and compiles information tracking people by their social security number and even cranks in a person’s address and collects phone numbers of neighbors who own property in the same block or street and provide the bill collectors with those names, numbers, as well as family names and phone numbers.  Since she had nothing to share with the bill collectors constantly calling, she ignored their calls.  Now they’re calling her family and neighbors.

As outrageous as this may appear, telling a bill collector you are jobless and dying of cancer means nothing.  Offering the house as collateral and providing them a legitimate MLS number so they can see she has her house on the market and priced right is meaningless.  They just don’t care.  But telling them she has little income doesn’t work either.  Dying of cancer, no job, still the calls keep coming in daily and now she’s hassled with answering the same questions to neighbors and family who know she’s been through Chemo hell. 

No one, so far, knows if it’s legal or not here in Florida where I live.  I checked because I thought it was illegal but apparently even calling an employer is legal as long as they don’t reveal the amount the person is behind but OK to ask the employer to have the employee call them back.  But it still tips off the employer that the employee is not paying a bill.  Most employers don’t like bill collectors calling them and unfortunately for Bonnie she was forced to leave her job over a year ago because she ran out of vacation and sick time.  Currently she receives less than a thousand dollars a month on disability having left a job that previously paid her $65,000 a year.

LexisNexis is used by attorneys and news reporting agencies for the most part.  It’s a resource for anyone who wants personal information on someone in their database that is more than what a citizen can find in the local public records at the courthouse.  I see it as an invasion of privacy.  More than that  it’s a ridiculous waste of time.  If a person doesn’t have the ability to pay, how is a phone call going to change that?

I keep wondering why bill collectors even bother to call someone dying, no job, and not enough income stream to buy food for her dog.