Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Transcripts Reveal That Rogue Debt Collectors Have Utter Disregard For Federal Laws (Part 2)


Are debt collectors likely to violate certain provisions of federal law more than others? Based on my experience, the answer is yes.

We identified those provisions in a previous post. If you ever hear from a debt collector, you might want to be on alert for these unlawful tactics. Using transcripts from my conversations with collectors, we will give you a "blow by blow" account of how consumers' rights can be trampled. (See transcripts at the end of this post.)

My advice is to tape record any conversation you have with a debt collector. We heard from what you might call "high-end collectors," representing a company called NCO that is owned by JPMorgan Chase, the nation's largest bank. If collectors representing one of the largest private corporations in the world act like thugs, you can rest assured that those from the lower end of the "profession" will behave the same way.

Here are three provisions of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) that are perhaps most likely to be violated. The language of the statute can get somewhat highfalutin, but we will spell it out in everyday terms, with citations to the actual law. Then we will pull quotes from the transcripts to show exactly how collectors violated the law:

Collectors cannot communicate with anyone other than you about an alleged debt, except to seek information about your location (15 U.S.C. 1692b and 15 U.S.C. 1692c).

In our case, it was undisputed that the alleged debt to American Express was in my name only, so my wife, Carol, was a third party, under the law. The collectors, Tracy Mize and Jann Blalock of the Birmingham law firm Ingram and Associates, could talk to her only to seek information about my whereabouts. Instead, they talked to her for more than an hour, gathering 14 pages of notes about our personal financial situation. All of this was unlawful, as the transcripts spell out. Here is one example, from Transcript No. 1:

Tracy Mize: Yeah. We just want to know if you’re willing to make payment arrangements and I discussed with Carol some of those options, but she was too shaky and I didn’t feel confident that she was—okay, I gave her some information on if she felt you needed to refinance the house. . . .

Why might my wife have been "shaky"? Oh, I don't know, maybe it was because Mize told her that Ingram was going to sell her house "on the courthouse steps," over an alleged debt that did not involve her. That would make me shaky.

Here's another example from Transcript No. 3:

Jann Blalock: I probably have 14 pages of notes on your account right now at this time. Okay, the first time that I got involved with it was last night when your wife went absolutely hysterical. When she called in and said you were cutting the grass, and we need to know what was going to be done and said this, that and the other.

First, my wife did not call them, they called her; their own records show that. Second, if the Ingram firm offers any training at all to its employees, Mize and Blalock had to know these "14 pages of notes" were unlawfully obtained from a third party to the alleged debt. Did that stop them? Nope.


Collectors cannot lie to you in an effort to collect a debt (15 U.S.C. 1692e).

The discovery process in our lawsuit showed that the Ingram law firm was hired by NCO. Gregory R. Stevens, an NCO vice president, admitted that in an affidavit. Angie Ingram herself admitted that in an affidavit. And yet, Ingram's employees repeatedly told us they had been hired by American Express. That is the kind of "false and misleading" representation that is prohibited under the FDCPA. But Ingram employees tried it over and over again. Here is one example, from Transcript No. 2:

Jann Blalock: There's not anything that we can do, we have a fiduciary relationship with American Express. We represent them . . .  
Sir, all we have to do with you is that we have been retained by American Express to collect a debt.
Was that true? No. Was it unlawful to make a false statement to an alleged debtor? Yes.


Collectors cannot insult you in an effort to collect a debt (15 U.S.C. 1692d).

The Ingram collectors made regular use of insults. They claimed I was conducting a "witch hunt" by pointing to misconduct by lawyers that had tarnished our financial standing. They also said I was "playing schemes," by pointing out that Angie Ingram, under the ethics rules of her profession, had a duty to report misconduct by fellow members of the bar. Tracy Mize acknowledged that her boss had such an obligation, but said she was not going to fulfill it. (See Transcript No. 1.) Here is an example of one insult, from Transcript No. 2:

Roger Shuler: Well, I've been called a witch hunt, and I've been called everything else, and I'm getting sick of it. Do not call me at work. 
Jann Blalock: Okay, you need to find a different horse to ride, sir. This one is not going to work with us, okay?

Here is another example, from Transcript No. 2:

Roger Shuler: Well, you need to quit calling me at work and you need to quit calling me at home if you are going to act this way. I've-- 
Jann Blalock: I'll call you about a debt? I'm not interested in playing any schemes, okay?

If you possess a credit card, or ever buy anything on credit, you probably will hear someday from a debt collector. You might not owe the debt, and they almost certainly will not be able to prove you owe the debt. But they are likely to use unlawful tactics in an effort to milk it out of you anyway.

The tactics are on grim display in the following transcripts:

Ingram NCO Transcript1
Ingram NCO Transcript2
Ingram NCO Transcript3

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very enlightening post. You don't get the sense that these folks are terribly concerned about the FDCPA.

Anonymous said...

LS, your wife must be quite a talker if she gave debt collectors 14 pages of notes. That's impressive.

Unknown said...

bank, you called JPMorgan Chase a bank. It is not. It is an agent for the Federal Reserve System which is a global creditor.

"Banks" haven't been around for longer than we can know, the digital "money" is what we pay for and it is credit sold as debt with interest into perpetuity.

Non disclosed, but of course.

OPEN COMPETITION, this is what happened in America. We became the "creditor" the "Fed's" experiment in SHADOW GOVERNMENT.

Shadow Government is what stole your job because you are not obeying the agenda of a consumer that has a credit score and therefore, can live in the U.S. in Shadow Government's bio-metric global gluag.

legalschnauzer said...

Oh, Mrs. Schnauzer is not tight-lipped. She definitely can talk. That's one thing I can vouch for with certainty.

Unknown said...

FDCPA is beholding to Shadow Government. In fact there are no "judges" or "courts" or any "government employee" "public servant" that isn't beholding to Shadow Government.

The reality is, consumerism has been our decider with the Congress and other deciders to choose how the products experiment and of course then exchange and trade to make Shadow Government very rich, trillionaires, billionaires, and millionaires - Rollins' et al.

Anonymous said...

I notice that JPMorgan Chase has announced record net income for 4Q of 2012. Seems being in the debt-collection business is paying off for them nicely:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20130116005588/en/JPMorgan-Chase-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-2012-Net-Income

Anonymous said...

Aren't debt collectors supposed to send you some sort of written confirmation before they start calling?

Anonymous said...

Re: The Schnauzer at 9:03 AM

Be careful or you may end up in the "Schnauzer House" !!!

legalschnauzer said...

I have a permanent room in the "Schnauzer House." Quite familiar with it!

Anonymous said...

Karl Marx said that there would be a revolution when the women wanted one, even the ugly ones.

Women who cultivate self-love are all powerful in loving self, first, and therefore can't be intimidated wilted violets.

As hard as the "propagandists" work at destroying the power of the feminine, it has not worked.

Got masses of women in a parade to be hypnotized into lighting up all at the same time and called that act, "freedom." Sticks got lit up and the poisons began intoxicating the female Americans for the profit of tobacco companies.

How can a society look in the mirror in 2013, and say that controlled experiment was good for society, good for America?

Women got used and abused and this is not a new behavior. Rollins' is a model for how the controlled experiment was-is to work?

Whew, scary U.S. of A.

The south got propagandized into a ghetto-hell and can't escape this image, too long in the graveyard of buried hopes, southern culture gone bye-bye ~long-long ago.

Apple Pie, Mom, and wave the flag around and around while wars are sold as good for US, ask Bernays who got to be one of the "leaders" of our "free world."

Open Society Soros sold the color revolutions globally and in America? In or about the turn of the century, we already were the choosing of not a community that assembled and together problem solved as the/a majority rule.

Due process law was replaced by consumerism and this was measured by credit scores, eventually, as the model of technology improved the global bio-metric gulag.

How to unravel this? Ah, yes and we must. IT is the JP Morgan Chase, AMX, and whatever agent can lie, cheat and steal Americans' into ghetto-hell ...

.. well as Rollins' proves the most criminally insane are the highly rewarded in our "society" of an invisible government that is the shadow power in products unknown, unseen, no control whatsoever.

"Consuming" Americans must reset the imagination into a culture of community.

Legal Schnauzer has that nose pointed home alright, where it belongs!

Anonymous said...

LS, you've got lots of work to do to unravel the "Elite" Journalist here, his story:

"... The two leading figures representing these opposing positions were, respectively, the Pragmatic philosopher John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, a leading pundit, later to be dubbed the

"Dean of American Journalism"

in mid-Century.

.. Lippmann would decisively win the debate he and Dewey carried on during the 1920s, backed as he was by the inexorable growth of the public relations industry and a firmly ensconced elite consensus which alternatively held in contempt and feared the "intrusion of the public" into the affairs of the "responsible men."

http://www.scribd.com/doc/42104442/Walter-Lippmann-and-the-Phantom-Public

Anonymous said...

The Sovereign and Omnicompetent Citizen ~

This is the ideology that Lippmann stuck in his head, he refused to believe.

Mark Twain a living icon to the question of what defines the Sovereign and Omnicompetent Citizen?

So much about how the psychoanalysis kicked out of Vienna was a shadow-invisible government sold to Americans by way of "Journalism," that was an ELITE agenda as owners of the information-news-media decided as "humanitarians" of course, to herd the bewildered.

jeffrey spruill said...

You know, Mr. Shuler, I’m not going to sit here and listen to you downgrade me, obviously, you don’t care.

*

Mr.Schnauzer: Why would you do such a thing to one who's circumventing the law?

debt collection sydney said...

You should be alerted from the collectors’ unlawful tactics. Debt collectors have many tactics to recover debts some of them can be illegal. So you can aware about these tactics.