ATTORNEY GENERAL CHARGES “DEBT BUYERS” WITH DEFRAUDING MINNESOTA COURTS

Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson today in a legal filing accused one of the nation’s largest “debt buyers” of defrauding Minnesota courts and citizens by filing false and deceptive “robo-signed” affidavits—generated at its offices in St. Cloud, Minnesota—to collect on old consumer debts that it purchased from credit card companies and others for about three cents on the dollar.

The debt buyer—Midland Funding, LLC and its administrative arm, Midland Credit Management, Inc. (collectively Midland)—has purchased $54.7 billion in old consumer debt from credit card companies and other companies. In 2009, it filed 245,000 lawsuits against individual citizens nationwide, and it has filed over 15,000 lawsuits against citizens in Minnesota courts since 2008. Midland pays for its debt acquisitions with hundreds of millions in financing from some of the nation’s largest banks, including several that sell old debt to it.

“The company put its thumb on the scale of justice to unfairly tilt the collection process in its favor,” said Attorney General Swanson.

The Attorney General said that debt buyers cast a wide net to find people who may owe old bills and often pursue the wrong person altogether or pursue people who paid the bills long ago. In some cases, debt buyers pursue people solely because they have the same or similar name or address as the real debtor. The Attorney General said that Midland has created false and unreliable mass-produced, “robo-signed” affidavits as supposed “proof” of consumer debts in lawsuits against individual citizens in order to obtain judgments against or extract payments from mostly unrepresented citizens, some of whom had no knowledge of any alleged debt.

Midland and its publicly-traded parent corporation, Encore Capital Group, Inc., have paid more than $1.8 billion to obtain 33 million customer accounts with a face value of about $54.7 billion, or an average cost of about three cents on the dollar, according to Encore’s 2010 Form 10-K. Midland and Encore buy electronic portfolios containing billions of dollars of old, charged-off consumer debt from credit card companies, banks, telecommunications firms, and other creditors. These include Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, HSBC, Providian, and Verizon Wireless, among others. Several of these banks, including Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Citibank, also provided Midland with financing to pursue its debt acquisitions and collections. For example, Encore currently has a $410 million revolving credit line to acquire consumer debt from many of the same banks that have sold debt to Midland, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citibank.

The Attorney General alleges that Midland aggressively filed thousands of lawsuits against individual citizens for collection of old, purchased debt, often supporting those lawsuits with “robo-signed” affidavits generated at its St. Cloud offices. Midland filed the robo-signed affidavits in state courts in Minnesota and around the country to obtain judgments against individual citizens.

“Robo-signing” is the practice of signing off on mass-produced, computer-generated legal documents without reading them or verifying the accuracy of the contents in order to speed up the collection process. In recent months, the mortgage industry has come under intense national scrutiny for supporting mortgage foreclosures in court with “robo-signed” affidavits. Like the mortgage industry, some debt buyers, including Midland, have used false, robo-signed affidavits to support their debt collections lawsuits.

Because acquired debt portfolios involve old debt and because debt buyers typically only acquire an electronic file about the debt and not actual copies of underlying charge slips, account statements, signed contracts, etc., citizens regularly are hounded by debt buyers for payment of bills they do not owe. In some cases, debt buyers sue people solely because they have the same or similar name or address as the real debtor, while in other cases they pursue people for bills paid back long ago. The National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) has estimated that one out of ten lawsuits filed by debt buyers are premised on bad or incorrect information.

As noted above, since 2008, Midland filed over 15,000 lawsuits in Minnesota state courts against individual Minnesota citizens, obtaining default judgments against unrepresented citizens an estimated 98 percent or more of the time. A default judgment is obtained when the subject of the lawsuit does not have an attorney and does not appear in court to contest the lawsuit. Some citizens sued by Midland state that they did not contest the lawsuit because they were not served with it, could not afford an attorney, or did not recognize the name of the debt buyer, since they had never done business with it. Midland filed false, robo-signed affidavits as supposed “proof” of the debt so as to leverage individual citizens into settlements or to persuade courts to enter default judgments against citizens on old debts. The affidavits, however, did not constitute “proof” of the debt because they were robo-signed by people who did not read them and/or who had absolutely no knowledge about the alleged debts to which they attested.