Woman Sues Debt Collectors Over Alleged Facebook Harassment

Laura Bassett
Huffington Post

A Florida woman who fell behind on her car payments is suing the company she claims has been using Facebook to contact her family members in a campaign to embarrass and intimidate her into paying the debt.

When Melanie Beacham of St. Petersburg had to take a medical leave of absence from her job this summer, she alerted the company, Mark One Financial, that she would likely fall behind on her monthly $362 car payments, her attorney told The Huffington Post. Two months later, the attorney said, Mark One representatives began calling Beacham up to 20 times a day and contacting her cousin and sister on Facebook.

The plaintiff's court filings allege that on July 30, a Mark One representative using the pseudonym "Jeff Happenstance" sent a message to Beacham's cousin asking him to have Beacham call a phone number that leads to a debt collection agent at Mark One. Beacham said the company also contacted her sister, who lives in Georgia.

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Debt Collectors Accused Of Fake Courtroom, Judge

Pa. Attorney General Sues Unicredit In Erie

Pittsburgh Channel

ERIE, Pa. -- A sign in the front of a building on West 39th Street tells visitors that it's the Unicredit Debt Resolution Center in Erie.

Once debtors got inside, they were fooled into believing they were in a courtroom with a judge, but the whole thing was a fake, according to a lawsuit filed by the Pennsylvania attorney general.

Team 4's Jim Parsons reported that Unicredit America is accused in the lawsuit of deceiving, misleading and coercing hundreds of consumers into paying off their debts.

Inside the building is a pair of locked oak doors with brass handles resembling a courtroom entrance. The company is accused in the lawsuit of building a mock courtroom complete with a judge's bench and witness stand.

Unicredit President Mike Covatto declined to comment on Friday.

"Can I look at your fake courtroom?" Parsons asked.

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The New Private Tax Man From Ancient Rome

Anthony Freda Illustration

William Alden
Huffington Post

Sheila Rice, who sold her Maryland home to avoid foreclosure, was surprised to learn JPMorgan Chase was her property tax collector. But the bank can't claim to be the first private company to play the role of tax man: It's taken part in a more than 2,000-year-old tradition that, from its very start, has been tainted by abuse.

As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported this week, big banks and hedge funds in the U.S. have been quietly collecting taxes on hundreds of thousands of homes. The process, called "tax farming," is simple: A company goes to a local government and reimburses it for taxes that citizens aren't paying. In return, the company gets to act like an old-fashioned tax thug -- the kind rabbis condemn in the Bible -- charging up to 18 percent interest and thousands of dollars in legal fees, simply because it can. As the District of Columbia attorney general told the HuffPost Investigative Fund, there's "no oversight at all."

Like many great American traditions, the tax farming game was perfected by the ancient Romans. Provincial governors, and later Rome itself, sold tax-collection rights to private companies called publicani. As in modern America, this was a speculative bet -- a company paid a local government's tax debt, and then tried its own hand at recouping the loss. The Roman version was plainly brutal. In ours, the brutality is subtle. But in the estimation of one expert in ancient finance, it's just as bad: In our own way, we're sliding toward the conditions of ancient Rome, where private tax collectors employed soldiers to wring excessive amounts of cash from debtors.

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Economists Say US Must Prepare for "Savage Austerity"

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Howard Davies, chairman of the London School of Economics, and Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup Inc., talk about the potential impact of additional quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve on the U.S. economy. Davies and Buiter say "Savage Austerity" coming to America as they talk with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance Midday." (Source: Bloomberg)


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Cash-strapped governments ramping up tax-collection efforts

Markham Heid
Washington Examiner

Tax officials throughout the Washington region are trying new and often extraordinary measures to collect tens of millions of dollars in delinquent payments, as huge projected budget deficits threaten to slash public services.

Together, Washington-area localities are owed more than $40 million in overdue real estate taxes from fiscal 2010 alone. Additional millions in unrecovered fines, fees and personal property tax revenues compound those shortfalls.

They say they have been able to maintain historically high collection rates, but only by resorting to unusually aggressive collection methods.

"We give people appropriate notice, but if they ignore us, we'll just drive out to their house and remove their car from their driveway. That's an attention getter," said Arlington County Treasurer Frank O'Leary.

O'Leary said he has used such tactics in the past, but lately has encountered a startling new phenomenon.

"This year I sent my people out to collect some vehicles, and they came back and said the properties had been abandoned," O'Leary said. "That had never occurred in Arlington in all the years I'd been treasurer, and it was really sobering to hear that."

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Big Banks, Hedge Funds Become Surrogate Tax Collectors

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Wall Street titans have a new sweet spot -- as surrogate tax collectors. They see profits in tacking on fees and threatening to foreclose when homeowners fall behind on property taxes.

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