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Monday, June 09, 2008
Courts - "Cook County Circuit Court has been turned into a frenetic debt collections machine"
This long story today in the Chicago Tribune, reported by Ameet Sachdev, begins:
Cook County Circuit Court has been turned into a frenetic debt collections machine, a reflection of easy credit gone sour and a collections industry determined to get paid.More than 119,000 civil lawsuits against alleged debtors are clogging courtrooms, and at least half will result in judgments that debt collectors will use to dock wages, seize bank accounts and file liens against homes, compounding the woes of troubled borrowers.
But because debt collectors operate on volume—pushing through lawsuits based on little more than lists of names, addresses and alleged amounts due—there are also plenty of instances of mistaken identities, cases where debts are alleged when the bills have been paid and even situations where people have fallen behind and tried to work out repayments only to be hauled in to court.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on June 9, 2008 12:17 PM
Posted to Courts in general