Bad Paper: How To Outsmart the Debt Collectors – Indebted or not, good info

Jake Halpern’s great new book, Bad Paper, an adaptation of which is published in The New York Times Magazine, follows a number of these collectors — many with multiple felony convictions to their name — around Buffalo, New York, the center of debt collections in the US. According to the Urban Institute, roughly 77 million Americans, or 35% of adults with a credit file, have a report of debt in collections. In some places, that number is significantly higher: In Las Vegas, for instance, it’s 50%¹. Of that 35%, most do the wrong thing when approached by debt collection agencies. Their first instinct is to hang up the phone, to run away, to try to ignore the problem, which almost never works. What does work: Taking action like writing a letter to the company in question, instructing its representatives not to contact you. This generally does the trick — until the collection agency sells your debt to yet another collection agency.

As Halpern’s book explains, the unluckiest of debtors end up being taken to court by one of these agencies, in which case they have to show up — or risk a default judgment being taken out against them, and their creditors given the opportunity to seize their bank accounts, their salaries, and just about anything else they own. 

When a debtor shows up to court, there’s a wrong thing and a right thing to do. The wrong thing is for the debtor to settle the case; the right thing is for the debtor to contest it, and ask the creditors to prove that they have title to the debt in question. Almost nobody does this — but if the debtor does it, he will walk out of that courthouse without owing a penny. The reason? When lenders pass debt onto a collection agency, they don’t formally transfer title to the debt. That would be too expensive, given how little they are selling the debt for. So instead they just pass over a simple spreadsheet, with a debtor’s name and the amount of money he owes. And that spreadsheet will never stand up in court.

In general, it’s a good idea for people to pay their debts. But there’s an exception to that rule, and that’s when those debts have already been defaulted on. At that point, a person’s credit score is completely shot, the people who lent the money have already written it off, and even if the debtor pays the collectors back in full, the original lenders won’t see any of the cash. So if a debt collector armed with nothing more than a spreadsheet and a phone number starts pestering you for money, treat him the way you would any other cold-caller looking for your cash: Tell him not to contact you any more — and then, in the unlikely event that you receive a summons, tell him he has no title to your debt and that you’re not going to pay him a penny.