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Sort of. I got into a rough spot after I got out of the military and I ended up defaulting on all my credit card debt. I got kicked out for being gay with no no

Sort of. I got into a rough spot after I got out of the military and I ended up defaulting on all my credit card debt. I got kicked out for being gay with no notice and had no savings. What little I had went to moving and finding a new job. Only AmEx sued me (and we settled). I later sued most of the collection companies with the help of a lawyer and netted about $40K in settlements. Some had called my parents and told them they’d call the police and arrest me that day (they paid). Another called me work repeatedly and told my boss (he didn’t care other than the endless harassment). It took 7 years for my credit to be clean. I still get calls from scummy bottom of the barrel collectors about debt I paid/settled - even 20 years later. They give up easily though, statute of limitations is long past. Anyway my point is it’s not optional, you can get sued. And they'll harass you endlessly.

l33t7332273 3y ago
> Another called me work repeatedly and told my boss Even from a purely self serving perspective, why would they do this? If your boss gets mad that you have bad debt and fires you, then it’s now even less likely that you will be paying off the debt, no?
- stbenjam 3y ago
  My experience with debt collectors is they don’t act rationally and once they’re able to find someone they harass you using any means necessary. The fear of being fired is a good motivator to get people to pay.
  - FreshStart 3y ago
    It's basically stalking made a profession.. So it draws a certain crowd.
  - PartiallyTyped 3y ago
    I mean they are extorting your livelihood. I think that’s pretty up there in terms of scummy behaviour.
  - oceanghost 3y ago
    Precisely. I got a new land-line-number in the early 2000s. One day, I got a collection call for someone with a Mexican surname. I explained I had just gotten the number and I didn't know who that person was. So naturally, they called twice a day for months. I disconnected the line because I was basically paying $20/m for them to harass me. And here's the part I can't explain-- even after being disconnected, the phone would ring but only for the debt collector. EDIT: Another story. Solar Panels in the late early 2010s. The ex-wife's father died years ago, once or twice a week, someone would call her cell phone, ask for her dead father and then try to sell her solar panels. They would not stop. It escalated to calls 6 days a week. I eventually got fed up and told them I'd be happy to come down there with a pistol if they kept calling. I know, not the best choice, but keep in mind this is after 6 months of daily harassment. The guy on the other end of the phone flipped out, told me “I was committing a federal crime, and he was going to report me to the police and to expect them shortly.” Then, as an intimidation tactic, he read my full name and address-- except it was my dead FILs information. I told him to go ahead and put his name on a police report so I knew his name. The calls stopped for one month, and then started again.
- iamdbtoo 3y ago
  I think part of it is simply competition against other collection efforts. The scariest collector will probably get paid before the others.
- jancsika 3y ago
  > Even from a purely self serving perspective, why would they do this? Because nearly nothing in the world works on the level of individually self-serving, containerized ideas which have direct one-to-one causes and effects. As an exercise, instead imagine these companies operating on high latency, realtime digital signal graphs running at low sample rates. Say one of those companies' graphs needs to operate on an incoming stream of 10,000 samples. The company obviously desires the highest frequencies to pass into the "payment received" output. So they add an "anger-the-boss" filter into the signal chain. There aren't just direct consequences here-- each change causes a rippling effect for the consequent samples. And that rippling effect clearly changes the behavior of some consequent victims. For example, if victims already heard about these nasty tactics and they want to keep their current job, they might decide to pay if those tactics are still being used. It probably doesn't get the optimal output for the company. But the article talks about how a 1% change in payment rates can be the difference between success and bankruptcy. Like most realtime systems, they don't have the luxury of screwing around with potentially better outcomes if it ever means missing deadlines for paying the company's bills. You'd probably drive yourself crazy thinking of all human affairs as low-latency DSP graphs. But I would propose doing the exercise however long it takes to get rid of the pattern of reflexively approaching any new social puzzle by positing a perfectly self-interested and self-contained individual sample.
- cj 3y ago
  This may be hard for HN readers to believe given the anti-employer sentiment in many threads here, but... My friend owns 15+ apartment buildings in "not so desirable" neighborhoods. He deals with a lot of tenants who don't pay rent and eventually he has to evict them. 3 months ago he was evicting someone for not paying rent for 12+ months, and a week before the police were going to help get the tenant out of the apartment, his employer stepped in and paid the landlord his back-rent in full. The tenant was employed at a local roofing company. Apparently he was a good roofer, and the owner of the company didn't want to see the worker homeless, so he stepped in and paid a year of the guy's back rent. (And here's the twist... after his employer stepped in and settled his back rent, the tenant still refuses to pay rent, and will be evicted again 6-9 months from now) Maybe debt collectors have had similar luck as the landlord in this story, but that's probably a secondary motivation. Primary motivation for the debt collector is intimidation. Debt collection agencies are ruthless in all ways imaginable.
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Landlords that own entire apartment buildings are parasites, so there's not going to be very much sympathy. Most parasite species are mitigated much more directly once detected by a human host.
    - BasedAnon 3y ago
      I'm kind of tired of this thinly-veiled socialist sentiment.
      - aaomidi 3y ago
        Then offer a proper argument that supports making profit off of owning property.
        BasedAnon 3y ago
        i have the power to do so, and i like to do so, so i will do so. what's your argument for stopping me?
- tzs 3y ago
  > If your boss gets mad that you have bad debt and fires you, then it’s now even less likely that you will be paying off the debt, no? It might increase the chances that when you get another job you will agree to start making payments on the debt so that they won't get you fired from that job too.
mistrial9 3y ago
[flagged]
- stbenjam 3y ago
  Why doubt me? I’m 40. The gay ban ended in 2011…
  - effingwewt 3y ago
    When I read/hear things like OP's statement I try and remind myself I say/write things I look back on and regret all the time. Sometimes my face turns red from shame. Every day a bit wiser or whatever. I was in the army back then and Im 43 this year. We had 2 guys in my basic training platoon who pretended to be gay to get kicked out. It backfired as they were held in reception for several months before finally being sent home (long after basic/AIT had ended). Compare that to a woman (we were the first co-ed basic training barracks) wboy was caught staring at other women inappropriately in the shower who was on a bus home the next day. If they thought it was real it was instant. I truly feel for you, and things like this are what make me mad when I get told today that young gay people are oppressed, or harassed. Your generation truly was, and I'm also glad the worst today's generation can complain about is pronouns, because to me that really means we have come quite far. I hope things turned out better for you
  - mistrial9 3y ago
    because the only other guy I know in real life that said that, was hired by the company I worked for, and he proceeded to write company checks to pay off his student loans, and tried to seduce multiple males in the office for sex acts. When the management found out, since he was a "protected minority" they simply fired him instead of pressing the well-deserved criminal charges. The story was always how oppressed he was.. actions did not match the words. So yes, I do doubt you and others with this kind of simplistic explanation of real situations.
ta20230813 3y ago
> I got kicked out for being gay with no notice and had no savings. Same, in December 2002. Feels a little strange how it works now, compared to be drug out of the barracks by MPs like a criminal. The Army never apologizes.
- warner25 3y ago
  I'm curious about this. 2002 was before my time, and DADT was mostly before my time, but I've overseen a couple dozen administrative separations for other things (ranging from actual criminal conduct to repeated fitness test failures) as a platoon leader and commander, and I've never seen anything like this. The bureaucracy will drag out any separation action for months; like at a minimum it will include a series of formal counseling statements by your first-line supervisor and commander, visits to Trial Defense Services, and mental and physical health assessments that take weeks to schedule. Even in cases of actual criminal conduct, the MPs are very rarely involved. A first-line supervisor NCO would handle the task of escorting the person to their appointments and pulling guard duty if there were some restrictions in place (also rare). Is there more to these stories?
- stbenjam 3y ago
  Yea it’s still not fully accepting but nobody’s kicked out anymore. I know I’ll never get an apology. The US doesn’t apologize. I do see the occasional person bringing their SO to the Navy and Marine balls.
coldtea 3y ago
>Another called me work repeatedly and told my boss This, in a functional legal system, should have them immediately arrested and/or slapped with a fine.
- AlexandrB 3y ago
  It probably doesn't matter how functional the legal system is, these kinds of operators will always find grey areas where what they're doing is not technically illegal but still makes your life harder.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Then the law should enumerate very specific actions that only those are allowed (e.g. sending you an email or calling your director home or mobile number only, and only, say, once a month). Anything else should be punishible. Or the law could get a little more flexible and punish them for their intent, even if what they do is a "gray" area. Or it could also make "collection agencies" illegal in their entirety. The other side can just inform you of your debt, once, and if you fail to comply within a legally mandated deadline, they can go through the courts if they want to pursue it further. Who said "debt collecting" companies should be a thing?
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      The law about collections has been trending towards "only this is allowed" for a long time. It takes time for the legal system to set precedents and create a legal body of work around issues like these. It moves very slow. Thankfully, at least for medical debt, there are pretty harsh laws against collections.
- stbenjam 3y ago
  Well I sued and got paid, but it wasn’t easy. I’m sure it didn’t change their behavior. They know most won’t sue. The guy who did it is still there working, I looked him up on LinkedIn. Finding consumer lawyers willing to take FDCPA cases is tough.

l33t7332273 3y ago

> Another called me work repeatedly and told my boss Even from a purely self serving perspective, why would they do this? If your boss gets mad that you have bad debt and fires you, then it’s now even less likely that you will be paying off the debt, no?

stbenjam 3y ago
My experience with debt collectors is they don’t act rationally and once they’re able to find someone they harass you using any means necessary. The fear of being fired is a good motivator to get people to pay.
- FreshStart 3y ago
  It's basically stalking made a profession.. So it draws a certain crowd.
- PartiallyTyped 3y ago
  I mean they are extorting your livelihood. I think that’s pretty up there in terms of scummy behaviour.
- oceanghost 3y ago
  Precisely. I got a new land-line-number in the early 2000s. One day, I got a collection call for someone with a Mexican surname. I explained I had just gotten the number and I didn't know who that person was. So naturally, they called twice a day for months. I disconnected the line because I was basically paying $20/m for them to harass me. And here's the part I can't explain-- even after being disconnected, the phone would ring but only for the debt collector. EDIT: Another story. Solar Panels in the late early 2010s. The ex-wife's father died years ago, once or twice a week, someone would call her cell phone, ask for her dead father and then try to sell her solar panels. They would not stop. It escalated to calls 6 days a week. I eventually got fed up and told them I'd be happy to come down there with a pistol if they kept calling. I know, not the best choice, but keep in mind this is after 6 months of daily harassment. The guy on the other end of the phone flipped out, told me “I was committing a federal crime, and he was going to report me to the police and to expect them shortly.” Then, as an intimidation tactic, he read my full name and address-- except it was my dead FILs information. I told him to go ahead and put his name on a police report so I knew his name. The calls stopped for one month, and then started again.
iamdbtoo 3y ago
I think part of it is simply competition against other collection efforts. The scariest collector will probably get paid before the others.
jancsika 3y ago
> Even from a purely self serving perspective, why would they do this? Because nearly nothing in the world works on the level of individually self-serving, containerized ideas which have direct one-to-one causes and effects. As an exercise, instead imagine these companies operating on high latency, realtime digital signal graphs running at low sample rates. Say one of those companies' graphs needs to operate on an incoming stream of 10,000 samples. The company obviously desires the highest frequencies to pass into the "payment received" output. So they add an "anger-the-boss" filter into the signal chain. There aren't just direct consequences here-- each change causes a rippling effect for the consequent samples. And that rippling effect clearly changes the behavior of some consequent victims. For example, if victims already heard about these nasty tactics and they want to keep their current job, they might decide to pay if those tactics are still being used. It probably doesn't get the optimal output for the company. But the article talks about how a 1% change in payment rates can be the difference between success and bankruptcy. Like most realtime systems, they don't have the luxury of screwing around with potentially better outcomes if it ever means missing deadlines for paying the company's bills. You'd probably drive yourself crazy thinking of all human affairs as low-latency DSP graphs. But I would propose doing the exercise however long it takes to get rid of the pattern of reflexively approaching any new social puzzle by positing a perfectly self-interested and self-contained individual sample.
cj 3y ago
This may be hard for HN readers to believe given the anti-employer sentiment in many threads here, but... My friend owns 15+ apartment buildings in "not so desirable" neighborhoods. He deals with a lot of tenants who don't pay rent and eventually he has to evict them. 3 months ago he was evicting someone for not paying rent for 12+ months, and a week before the police were going to help get the tenant out of the apartment, his employer stepped in and paid the landlord his back-rent in full. The tenant was employed at a local roofing company. Apparently he was a good roofer, and the owner of the company didn't want to see the worker homeless, so he stepped in and paid a year of the guy's back rent. (And here's the twist... after his employer stepped in and settled his back rent, the tenant still refuses to pay rent, and will be evicted again 6-9 months from now) Maybe debt collectors have had similar luck as the landlord in this story, but that's probably a secondary motivation. Primary motivation for the debt collector is intimidation. Debt collection agencies are ruthless in all ways imaginable.
- flangola7 3y ago
  Landlords that own entire apartment buildings are parasites, so there's not going to be very much sympathy. Most parasite species are mitigated much more directly once detected by a human host.
  - BasedAnon 3y ago
    I'm kind of tired of this thinly-veiled socialist sentiment.
    - aaomidi 3y ago
      Then offer a proper argument that supports making profit off of owning property.
      - BasedAnon 3y ago
        i have the power to do so, and i like to do so, so i will do so. what's your argument for stopping me?
tzs 3y ago
> If your boss gets mad that you have bad debt and fires you, then it’s now even less likely that you will be paying off the debt, no? It might increase the chances that when you get another job you will agree to start making payments on the debt so that they won't get you fired from that job too.

mistrial9 3y ago

[flagged]

stbenjam 3y ago
Why doubt me? I’m 40. The gay ban ended in 2011…
- effingwewt 3y ago
  When I read/hear things like OP's statement I try and remind myself I say/write things I look back on and regret all the time. Sometimes my face turns red from shame. Every day a bit wiser or whatever. I was in the army back then and Im 43 this year. We had 2 guys in my basic training platoon who pretended to be gay to get kicked out. It backfired as they were held in reception for several months before finally being sent home (long after basic/AIT had ended). Compare that to a woman (we were the first co-ed basic training barracks) wboy was caught staring at other women inappropriately in the shower who was on a bus home the next day. If they thought it was real it was instant. I truly feel for you, and things like this are what make me mad when I get told today that young gay people are oppressed, or harassed. Your generation truly was, and I'm also glad the worst today's generation can complain about is pronouns, because to me that really means we have come quite far. I hope things turned out better for you
- mistrial9 3y ago
  because the only other guy I know in real life that said that, was hired by the company I worked for, and he proceeded to write company checks to pay off his student loans, and tried to seduce multiple males in the office for sex acts. When the management found out, since he was a "protected minority" they simply fired him instead of pressing the well-deserved criminal charges. The story was always how oppressed he was.. actions did not match the words. So yes, I do doubt you and others with this kind of simplistic explanation of real situations.

ta20230813 3y ago

> I got kicked out for being gay with no notice and had no savings. Same, in December 2002. Feels a little strange how it works now, compared to be drug out of the barracks by MPs like a criminal. The Army never apologizes.

warner25 3y ago
I'm curious about this. 2002 was before my time, and DADT was mostly before my time, but I've overseen a couple dozen administrative separations for other things (ranging from actual criminal conduct to repeated fitness test failures) as a platoon leader and commander, and I've never seen anything like this. The bureaucracy will drag out any separation action for months; like at a minimum it will include a series of formal counseling statements by your first-line supervisor and commander, visits to Trial Defense Services, and mental and physical health assessments that take weeks to schedule. Even in cases of actual criminal conduct, the MPs are very rarely involved. A first-line supervisor NCO would handle the task of escorting the person to their appointments and pulling guard duty if there were some restrictions in place (also rare). Is there more to these stories?
stbenjam 3y ago
Yea it’s still not fully accepting but nobody’s kicked out anymore. I know I’ll never get an apology. The US doesn’t apologize. I do see the occasional person bringing their SO to the Navy and Marine balls.

coldtea 3y ago

>Another called me work repeatedly and told my boss This, in a functional legal system, should have them immediately arrested and/or slapped with a fine.

AlexandrB 3y ago
It probably doesn't matter how functional the legal system is, these kinds of operators will always find grey areas where what they're doing is not technically illegal but still makes your life harder.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Then the law should enumerate very specific actions that only those are allowed (e.g. sending you an email or calling your director home or mobile number only, and only, say, once a month). Anything else should be punishible. Or the law could get a little more flexible and punish them for their intent, even if what they do is a "gray" area. Or it could also make "collection agencies" illegal in their entirety. The other side can just inform you of your debt, once, and if you fail to comply within a legally mandated deadline, they can go through the courts if they want to pursue it further. Who said "debt collecting" companies should be a thing?
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    The law about collections has been trending towards "only this is allowed" for a long time. It takes time for the legal system to set precedents and create a legal body of work around issues like these. It moves very slow. Thankfully, at least for medical debt, there are pretty harsh laws against collections.
stbenjam 3y ago
Well I sued and got paid, but it wasn’t easy. I’m sure it didn’t change their behavior. They know most won’t sue. The guy who did it is still there working, I looked him up on LinkedIn. Finding consumer lawyers willing to take FDCPA cases is tough.