by Jeff Sovern
Years ago, I heard the puppet Lambchop (Shari Lewis) sing The Song That Never Ends:
This is the song that never ends
Yes, it just goes on and on my friends.
Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was.
And they continue singing it forever just because,
This is the song that doesn’t end.
And then it repeats. I was reminded of that song by Ryan Felton's Jalopnik article, The Car Loans That Never Die about loans like Richard Parker's 1991 subprime auto loan for $9,198. It's been 27 years and he's still paying it off after he became too ill to work and so defaulted. The car was repossessed in 1994. Here's an excerpt from the article:
On April 22, 2005, the court again sided with the lender, ordering Parker to continue paying back a judgment that had by then grown to $27,315.
Credit Acceptance didn’t let up. In October 2012, it filed another request with the court to garnish Parker’s income taxes. At that point, he’d had $17,575.32 garnished—nearly double the amount of the original loan—but due to the interest costs accrued from the original judgment, records show, he still had $9,781.96 to go.
Actually, on second thought, it's not at all like a cute children's song.
This spells out the intentions of most nefarious debt collectors. Their objective is to collect payments for a lifetime from either illegally formed default judgments using fraud or make believe debts acquired by using false records or reports from auctions or foreclosures. Trustees are corrupting the laws by carrying out these procedures without adhering to the law. It is easy to falsify either the Auditors Reports in foreclosures or Auction Reports from automobile repossessions. This is one of the biggest “Get Rich Attorney Schemes” in America. Laws schools, professors, and Consumer Attorneys or Advocates act stupid as if this is non-existent, but instead in reality it is pervasive in most states. We live under and operate in a corrupt system of justice where judges wink and nod at crooked attorneys presenting obvious fraud. Until we clean up the system it will only get worse. Legal authorities and educators should stop pretending this isn’t happening.