Debt Stalkers
by digby
I have been wondering for some time when reports of this kind of behavior were going to burble to the surface. At a time when the mortgage companies are behaving like con men, you just know that the bottom feeders in the debt collection business are doing far worse:
The relentless phone calls were one thing, the Facebook messages were another.
Melanie Beacham, of St. Petersburg, Fla., said she fell behind in her car payments after falling ill, and she contacted MarkOne Financial to say she would make a payment when she could.
Still, she kept getting up to 20 phone calls a day from the lender and said it contacted her sister in Georgia and other relatives via Facebook.
Beacham contacted a lawyer, Billy Howard, who filed a lawsuit against MarkOne, asking a judge to ban the company from using social networking sites like Facebook to contact Beacham’s friends about her debt, according to WTSP.com.
“Now Facebook does a debt collector’s work for them,” Howard said. “Now it’s not only family members, it’s all of your associates. It’s a very powerful tool for debt collectors to use.”
You can make them stop if you hire a lawyer and refer all calls to him or her. Unfortunately, lawyers cost money.
The law allows these debt collectors to contact your friends, family and neighbors to try to “find” you, but the purpose is to embarrass you publicly and force you to pay to make it stop. I would imagine there’s a whole lot of that going around right now. Of course, with so many people going bankrupt and broke these days, there isn’t the stigma there used to be either. I don’t think that’s as effective as it used to be. But it’s creepy.
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