Post by bazooka on Oct 12, 2019 21:31:40 GMT
Do You Know Who Owns Your Debt?
How the debt-buying and debt-collection industries put the squeeze on Americans.
A house made out of credit cards falling apart
Photo Illustration by Alicia Tatone
Maria wasn’t even that interested in the pearl earrings that nearly ruined her life. But the saleswoman at the department store was insistent: She would be happy to hold on to the earrings, in case Maria changed her mind. All she had to do was provide the clerk with her store-branded credit card number. Why not, she figured. (The earrings were on sale.) After the clerk returned her card, Maria says, “I forgot about it.”
Maria didn’t use her card often, at the department store or anywhere else in her Texas town, and she never used it online. (We've changed the names and some identifying details of interviewees, including Maria, throughout this story, due to the sensitive nature of debt.)“When I buy something, I usually return it, because I feel guilty,” she tells me over the phone. So when monthly bills of around $100 began arriving, she paid them off quickly, figuring she had fallen a bit behind. But when the bills didn’t stop—and kept getting bigger—she grew alarmed. For months, Maria discovered, someone had used her account to buy jewelry, sportswear, handbags, lingerie—dozens of transactions that weren’t hers. “I don’t buy fancy underwear, believe me,” she says, laughing.
How the debt-buying and debt-collection industries put the squeeze on Americans.
Photo Illustration by Alicia Tatone
Maria wasn’t even that interested in the pearl earrings that nearly ruined her life. But the saleswoman at the department store was insistent: She would be happy to hold on to the earrings, in case Maria changed her mind. All she had to do was provide the clerk with her store-branded credit card number. Why not, she figured. (The earrings were on sale.) After the clerk returned her card, Maria says, “I forgot about it.”
Maria didn’t use her card often, at the department store or anywhere else in her Texas town, and she never used it online. (We've changed the names and some identifying details of interviewees, including Maria, throughout this story, due to the sensitive nature of debt.)“When I buy something, I usually return it, because I feel guilty,” she tells me over the phone. So when monthly bills of around $100 began arriving, she paid them off quickly, figuring she had fallen a bit behind. But when the bills didn’t stop—and kept getting bigger—she grew alarmed. For months, Maria discovered, someone had used her account to buy jewelry, sportswear, handbags, lingerie—dozens of transactions that weren’t hers. “I don’t buy fancy underwear, believe me,” she says, laughing.
She called the store to complain, but couldn’t remember the clerk’s name, and in any event, they told her she had waited too long to file a fraud claim. In the meantime, as her balance accumulated interest and late fees, Maria’s minimum payments ballooned to the point where she, a retired barber in her late 60s, could no longer afford to make them.