Legal & Illegal Scammers and the Quicksand of Debt

Hi, Barbara! Your face is on my TV right now, the re-broadcast of your 3/4/07
interview on CSPAN2. I have a lot respect for your criticism of an economic
culture that treats the people who do the work as expendable.

I’m a security analyst at a mid-sized bank, and I see how these same people are
vicitimized by scam artists, both legal and illegal. Ultimately, the legal and
illegal scammers work hand-in-hand. People who are paid too little to afford
even basic necessities are pushed over the economic edge by something as simple
as a $200 car repair without which they will lose their job in a locale with no
reliable public transportation.

They go first to the legal scammers, like the credit card companies that are
just looking for an opportunity to throw them into “default” interest rates as
high as 30%. When their paycheck isn’t enough to make even the minimum payment,
they go to the payday lenders who would once have been arrested as usurers but
have been permitted to charge mind-boggling (and undisclosed) interest rates
easily double that of the worst credit card. In the blink of an eye, the person
is deep in the quicksand of debt, turning over more and more of each paycheck
just to “roll over” loans they have no hope of repaying.

Once they are in this hopeless position, they are vulnerable to the con artists
who congratulate them on some windfall that will at last solve their problems:
“You’ve won a sweepstakes!”–”Your long lost uncle left you an inheritance in
Nigeria!”–whatever the story of the month happens to be. They want to believe,
because it’s the only ray of hope they’ve seen in ages. It’s even easier to
believe when the con artist sends them an official-looking check for several
thousand dollars, with the promise of hundreds of thousands more to come, if
only they’ll send back most of the first check for “taxes”, “fees” or some other
nonsense.

Of course, the money the struggling worker sends away is real. The check they
deposited always, always turns out to be fake, and now they owe my employer, the
bank, more money than they’ll ever be able to repay. We’ll tack on even more
fees just for being overdrawn, and finally close their account. The quicksand
has closed over their head, and they’ll never be seen in the economic mainstream
again.

It all started with a necessary expense that their paycheck couldn’t cover, or
more accurately, with a paycheck too small to cover necessary expenses. Yes,
the scammers, legal and illegal, my employer included, pushed them down into the
quicksand, but it started with an inadequate paycheck that made them vulnerable.
The employer is just one more scam artist.

Maybe someday, you could write a book that addresses these many factors that
contribute to this quicksand of debt, which I am convinced is the biggest threat
to many people’s economic well-being.

Tags: credt-card-companies, debt, scam-artists

This entry was posted on Monday, April 9th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.