Debt collectors searching cemeteries
By: John Bispala
It is said in court, "Dead men don't talk," but they may have to pay up their debts left behind! Read the articles in the local papers on new and aggressive companies that even go after the grieving relatives and survivors of a loved one who has recently died.
Usually relatives and survivors are not liable for uncollected debts of the deceased unless they are cosigners on loans or credit cards. However, every kind of sales trick, guilt trip and psychological gimmick is employed in repeated phone calls to the surviving spouse, or to whomever can be at least "milked" for information like is done in "phishing" over the Internet. They want to find out such things as who is the administrator of an estate. Some elderly who lived during the Great Depression or were born just after are of a mind to send the collector a check just to get them off their back, but that doesn't work. Above all, don't offer any information to the collector without legal advice from your attorney.
There are big companies raking in billions from people willing to pay. The collector stands to get sometimes as much as 50 percent of the collected funds. Often the old debt information is not even accurate, and the debts had been settled. Courts don't always do the necessary homework to verify the claim. You have to pay for your own defense.
I have one criticism of all of us at the grassroots neighborhood level. We are prone to exercise all our "leverage" more and more these days, borrowing and using up our credit lines, as though we won't have to pay anything back after we're gone. That's a form of stealing, isn't it? It's stealing not only from merchants who were willing to issue us credit but also from society. In the end, everybody has to pay for our style of life.
Write to your legislators, Minnesota Representative Joe Mullery and State Senator Linda Higgins about your concern and need for laws to protect us from unethical debt collectors.
John Bispala,
Webber-Camden