Debt collectors illegally threatened arrest, assault

[grantcart]

Source: CNN

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Michele Minton was crying as she listened to a man tell her she'd be arrested within the hour if she didn't pay a $4,400 debt.


Michele Minton says a collector bullied her into revealing her bank account number, though she didn't owe.

The man on the phone said he was a lawyer. Minton was at her Springville, New York, home with her children, ages 2 and 3, and her husband was away.

" started talking about, 'Your kids will see you arrested. If ... your husband can't make it home, child protective services will have to take your kids,' " she said, recalling the 2006 conversation.

Minton didn't owe anything, she says now. But feeling under pressure during that call, she gave the man her bank account number and she lost $900. Watch Minton describe the phone call »

The caller, Minton alleges, wasn't a lawyer, but an employee of a debt-collection operation that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is trying to shut down.

In a lawsuit filed this month in state supreme court in Erie County, Cuomo's office alleges employees of 13 debt collection companies run by Buffalo-based Benning-Smith Group illegally posed as law enforcement officials or lawyers and threatened to arrest and harm people unless they made arrangements to pay


Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/08/21/debt.collection/index.html

---

This type of thing makes me so angry - god help the poor sap that tries this BS on me.