Race--
It is going to take a MASSIVE overhaul of the 30-year-old FDCPA laws which doesn't even BEGIN to address the abuses associated with the explosion of the debt buying industry that these and hundreds of other bottom feeders are associated with. But I don't see that happening anytime soon. Here is an excerpt from The Boston Globe's 2006 series of articles entitled "Debtor's Hell", which will help to explain why OUR government is doing NOTHING about the abuses from the likes of Moreno and Woods (and others):
National Crisis, Official Silence
Regulators, policy makers seldom intervene
The debt business, as Donald Friedman, the chief operating officer of debt-buyer Liberty Point Corp., told hundreds of his assembled peers at their March 2005 gathering, is ''one of the sexiest, one of the most financially lucrative businesses you can get into.''
Boastful? Yes. Overstated? Hardly.
That year, businesses that specialize in debt for collection would purchase $66 billion in delinquent bank credit card accounts alone, paying just pennies on the dollar for the right to press consumers to pay up. That $66 billion represented a golden opportunity for them, and sudden vulnerability for an estimated 8 million card holders - all of them earmarked for repeated phone calls, dunning letters, lawsuits, wage garnishment, property seizure, and sometimes even arrest.
They generally owe the money, but seldom anticipate the consequences. A Spotlight Team investigation, which concludes today, found a system where debt collectors have a lopsided advantage; where debtors frequently face high-handed treatment; and where excessive fees can swiftly turn a small delinquency into a life-upending financial crisis.
Yet, in spite of all this, there is an eerie silence among regulators, policy makers, and legislators. Those who could intervene to right the balance between collectors and consumers are either unaware of the debt collection free-for-all, and the tens of millions of consumers caught up in it. Or they are simply unwilling to act.
In Massachusetts, for example, almost 800 complaints about debt collectors flow each year into the office of Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly, whose state website declares that he is ''on the front line working for consumers.'' Yet since Reilly took office in 1999, he has initiated legal action against just one collection agency, a Danvers company that paid a $100,000 fine two years ago.
When Reilly's office announced that settlement with Schreiber & Associates, it called it just the start. ''This investigation is part of a larger initiative aimed at protecting consumers from unfair debt collecting practices.''
No legal actions have been announced since then, though a spokesman for Reilly said last night that five investigations of debt collectors are underway.
Similarly passive is the Massachusetts Division of Banks, which also has regulatory authority over collectors. The banking regulators do little more than warehouse required annual filings by 410 debt collection companies - haphazardly, as the Globe discovered when it sought access to the division's records.
Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission, which is charged with enforcing a federal law that regulates the behavior of debt collectors, has done little in the face of an explosion of consumer outrage. From 1998 to 2005, the number of consumer complaints about debt collectors soared tenfold, from 6,678 to 66,627. Yet, in the last six years, the FTC has taken enforcement action against just 10 companies.
This year, an estimated 20 million Americans are three months or more past due on credit card accounts alone, according to data given to the Globe by Experian, one of three national credit reporting agencies. Yet it appears no one in government is keeping track of this alarming trend, not even the Federal Reserve Board, which in June assured Congress that bank credit card delinquency rates are ''not high by historical standards.'' But omitted from that calculation are the tens of billions of dollars that are ''written off'' the books by the credit card giants and sold to debt buyers for collection.
Court administrators who are most likely to be aware of the tidal wave of lawsuits against debtors have not, for the most part, raised concerns about credit caseloads that have turned many courtrooms into de facto subsidiaries of the collection business.
Meanwhile, Congress and many state legislatures have acquiesced to the politically powerful banking industry, which issues much of the credit that goes sour. The laws regulating debt collection predate, by a generation, the current boom for debt collectors. Their ranks have doubled in the last decade.
Frustrated regulators say the result is that many of the roughhouse tactics employed by collectors are legal.
http://www.boston.com/news/special/spotlight_debt/part4/page1.htmlThe article can be read in its entirety at:
http://boston.com/news/specials/debt/