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Credit card debt collection

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Re: Credit card debt collection

#371

Post by denton-scratch »

eru wrote: post #36

> I will bet you that, in practice, they simply avoid collecting against anyone who demonstrates ability and financial resources to enforce their rights. This is one for the history books of borked equilibriums. We devoted substantial efforts to pro-consumer legislation to address abuse of (mostly) poor people. We gated redress behind labor that is abundantly available in the professional managerial class and scarce…

> (like eg the British NHS does, modulo the option to go to a private hospital for enough money)

IME it's more complicated than that.

Firstly, the NHS allows consultants to do private work, making use of NHS resources, including beds, radiography and theatres. Secondly, a consultant can refer you back to the NHS for treatment, effectively "jumping the queue".

I would never rely on a private hospital. They never have an emergency department, and emergencies happen in hospitals too. Many private hospitals can only treat certain types of case; I wouldn't want to be stuck in a hospital that couldn't treat anything that happened to me.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#372

Post by PeterisP »

bluGill wrote: post #345
dfxm12 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is zero chance that I, a US resident, will ever use debit cards for anything. Does being a US resident have any meaning here? I mean, does the rest of the world not secure credit card payments, or does the rest of the world secure debit card payments like the US secures credit card payment?

In the US if your credit card number is compromised you are legally out at most $50 (I haven't checked in 20 years so this may have changed, my comment is at least partially historical). In almost all cases the bank will just wave that $50 as they are already paying the rest. If your debit card is compromised the money comes from your account and legally they don't have to return it to you, instead you need to figure…

In EU law all payments get pretty much the same protections as USA credit card payments, even for debit cards the customer is legally out at most 50 EUR, so there is no advantage in it being a credit card.

The motivation of Chip&PIN in EU is driven by the fact that banks are forced to cover most of the fraud costs (as opposed to USA, where much of stolen card fraud is forced upon merchants), so they have a motivation to actually prevent it; and the inconvenience of PIN is mitigated by highly prevalent contactless (and PIN-less) chip payments for small transactions.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#373

Post by specialist »

Tarq0n wrote: post #343
specialist wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debt: The First 5000 Years rewired my brain. Debt crisis followed by debt relief is historically normal. Prompting Graeber to wonder if capitalism is inherently unstable. Maybe capitalism somehow requires debt relief (eg jubilees, bankruptcy). Then we should codify it. Instead of continuing to treat them as unanticipated, unfortunate one-offs. Our recurring bubbles and bailouts seem to be keeping with Graeber's thesi…

Inflation is a kind of slow debt relief that may have largely replaced the need for jubilees.

True. Lenders oppose inflation, debtors favor it.

Which is why corporate media has apoplectic fits whenever interest rates go up or unemployment goes down.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#374

Post by PeterisP »

Uehreka wrote: post #271
Aardwolf wrote: post #218

> you, reader, use credit cards in preference to debit cards as a payment instrument Reader from Europe here. I use debit cards for daily payments, that's just the most standard expected payment method in Europe (with mobile payments now replacing it. Is a mobile payment app more like a debit or like a credit card? I have no idea actually!). But credit cards for online payments on the internet because (despite some d…

Not sure if this is different in Europe (check before saying it’s different, many people in the US aren’t aware of this either) but in the US at least all credit card transactions (and possibly debit too?) incur like a 3% fee. You’re paying that fee (either directly or through it being built into the price of goods) no matter what. The reason to use a card with a good rewards program is so that you actually get somet…

Interchange fees are a feature of all major card platforms (Visa, Mastercard, Amex, etc), however the fees have been regulated and limited in Europe, with credit card interchange fee being capped at 0.3% and the total merchant cost for cards generally being <1%. But, of course, that also means that there really isn't free money for any meaningful "rewards game" for EU cards.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#375

Post by dylan604 »

philwelch wrote: post #340
dylan604 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you're talking about the random person that approaches you on the street, then yes, that's a high possibility. but there are homeless that are not addicts and don't necessarily live on the streets. i think this confusion is something holding back progress on homelessness.

When you say “don’t give cash to homeless people” obviously you’re talking about beggars and street vagrants, not whatever demographic some NGO has decided to formally define as “homeless” in order to game the statistics.

First, I didn't say "don't give cash to homeless people" because I do have a very different interpretation of being homeless. The view you take sounds like you've been privileged enough to have never been homeless yourself. I promise you will think of homelessness in a very different manner if you ever have the misfortune of being homeless. I specifically modified the comment to call out addicts.

I have on multiple occasions helped someone out that was facing some very difficult decisions because of not having a place to stay. People that are not addicts can be put in making choices that they would never even consider in a normal situation, but we faced with sleeping in a car/street/public shelter, those choices suddenly start to look more acceptable. Even more so if you have kids.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#376

Post by Forgeties79 »

lr4444lr wrote: post #46
Forgeties79 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they agreed to the service 12+ years ago, were they shown the costs? Would you say their purchase was fully informed? Hell for all we know it was an ER visit and they had absolutely no say in the matter.

> Hell for all we know it was an ER visit and they had absolutely no say in the matter This has been tried in case law, and failed. Even if you're documented unconscious, the EMTs are allowed to make a good faith assumption that you want reasonable efforts of resuscitation. Look up "implied consent" laws.

I understand how it works, I think you’re missing the thrust of my point. Buying a car for an agreed-on price is one thing. Opaque medical billing where we don’t even know what is covered, let alone what it costs, is very different.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#377

Post by nbadg »

pjmlp wrote: post #347
nbadg wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear, people know the difference between Kreditkarte and Girokarte. Also, some nuance here: using the terms "Karte" and "Kreditkarte" interchangeably isn't the same thing as "people don't know the difference". I'm not making a statement about whether or not people understand the difference between direct debit and revolving credit as concepts. I'm making a statement on the language that is used to describe the…

I can only reply that west of Hamburg, Karte means any kind of card. Credit card is explicitly Kreditkarte. I also speak German fluenty, including partial knowledge of some dialects, and Swiss German. Since my last time in Berlin was 10 years ago, I'll have to take it.

Even in the local Ämtern? In my experience they're the worst offenders here.

For example, Zahlungsmöglichkeiten on these two pages:

[1] "Am Standort kann bar und mit girocard (mit PIN) (ehemals EC-Karte) bezahlt werden." This means nothing with Visa/Mastercard, period. Doesn't matter if you have a direct debit account or revolving credit. If you try to pay with eg an N26 Debit Mastercard, they say "Leider akzeptieren wir hier keine Kreditkarten". This language is basically standard in Berlin. When I responded with "das ist doch keine Kreditkarte, sondern eine Debitkarte" they said "ne, kommt von Mastercard, ist ne Kreditkarte. Sorry."

[2] "Zahlungen sind auch mit Kreditkarte möglich (VISA, Mastercard und Maestro)." They don't differentiate between Kredit- and Debitkarte when you're actually there; the only difference at this location is that they have Zahlungsautomaten that are integrated with the payment processors. This is a perfect example: Kreditkarte here explicitly refers to the payment processing system and not to the way the payment is booked to your account.

[1] https://service.berlin.de/standort/121646/

[2] https://service.berlin.de/standort/121885/

Re: Credit card debt collection

#378

Post by PeterisP »

smeej wrote: post #37

Weren't there reports back in the Occupy Wall Street days of people organizing to buy up debt like this and then just forgive it all? It sounds like debts are sold in such bulk that there's no way to do something very targeted, like starting an org in your town to buy debt from your ZIP and collecting contributions to cancel your neighbors' debts, but if these debts are already only worth 5¢ on the dollar to the sell…

The obvious limitation is that they only sell hopeless debt for pennies on the dollar - no lender will allow a community to buy all of their debt at a significant discount. You'll be able to buy your neighbors' debt only if your neighbour is either a complete deadbeat or their circumstances have changed so much that they are totally bankrupt; every other neighbor's debt won't be for sale.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#379

Post by PeterisP »

lolinder wrote: post #72
totetsu wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that works only the first time.

Why? The debt issuer has already written the debt off, why do they care whether it's bought by someone intent on forgiving it?

The debt issuer would note that they had to write most of that debt off, so the credit score impact will mean that the same borrower will have a much harder time getting another loan.

Re: Credit card debt collection

#380

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

worldwidelies wrote: post #189
Reason077 wrote: post #177

One thing that's not mentioned in this article is that credit card companies will sometimes make last-ditch "clear your debt at a discount" offers before passing your debt on to a collection agency. This happened to me many years ago. In the wake of the '08 financial crisis, I'd lost my job abruptly and decided to go travelling. I'd accumulated a balance that was fairly substantial for me at the time (on the order of…

same experience, except it wasn't that simple. A family member told me I should settle with them, because that's what they did too. They wiped the balance and closed the account but the settlement stayed on my credit score for 7 years. I had a friend who was getting calls by a debt servicer and was making it seem like no big deal. I told my friend to ask the person about the 7 years, the person reluctantly admitted t…

Worse than just that, it is also taxable. So you think you're paying a few hundred to close it out, then you get zinged for more taxes in April. If you were counting on getting a refund, you might come up short.
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