[blcknight]

Sort of. I got into a rough spot after I got out of the military and I ended up defaulting on all my credit card debt. I got kicked out for being gay with no notice and had no savings. What little I had went to moving and finding a new job.

Only AmEx sued me (and we settled). I later sued most of the collection companies with the help of a lawyer and netted about $40K in settlements. Some had called my parents and told them they’d call the police and arrest me that day (they paid). Another called me work repeatedly and told my boss (he didn’t care other than the endless harassment).

It took 7 years for my credit to be clean. I still get calls from scummy bottom of the barrel collectors about debt I paid/settled - even 20 years later. They give up easily though, statute of limitations is long past.

Anyway my point is it’s not optional, you can get sued. And they'll harass you endlessly.

[l33t7332273]

> Another called me work repeatedly and told my boss

Even from a purely self serving perspective, why would they do this? If your boss gets mad that you have bad debt and fires you, then it’s now even less likely that you will be paying off the debt, no?

[cj]

This may be hard for HN readers to believe given the anti-employer sentiment in many threads here, but...

My friend owns 15+ apartment buildings in "not so desirable" neighborhoods. He deals with a lot of tenants who don't pay rent and eventually he has to evict them.

3 months ago he was evicting someone for not paying rent for 12+ months, and a week before the police were going to help get the tenant out of the apartment, his employer stepped in and paid the landlord his back-rent in full.

The tenant was employed at a local roofing company. Apparently he was a good roofer, and the owner of the company didn't want to see the worker homeless, so he stepped in and paid a year of the guy's back rent. (And here's the twist... after his employer stepped in and settled his back rent, the tenant still refuses to pay rent, and will be evicted again 6-9 months from now)

Maybe debt collectors have had similar luck as the landlord in this story, but that's probably a secondary motivation. Primary motivation for the debt collector is intimidation. Debt collection agencies are ruthless in all ways imaginable.

[flangola7]

Landlords that own entire apartment buildings are parasites, so there's not going to be very much sympathy. Most parasite species are mitigated much more directly once detected by a human host.

[wongarsu]

It can be a mutually beneficial relationship: you want to live somewhere, but with the flexibility to be able to move on relatively short notice with minimal hassle, and without all the work, capital requirements and risk that comes with owning a house or condo. Somebody else owns an apartment building, and is already taking care of maintenance, paperwork etc. A perfect match.

The problem in the current market is that in many places there's far more demand than supply, so there's little pressure on the landlord to actually be a good landlord. If people could actually find other apartments at a similar price point in the area, people would just move out when the landlord doesn't uphold their part of the bargain, and competition would drive prices down to a point where the financial difference between buying and renting is a reasonable fee for the conveniences and flexibility of renting. But that's not the world most American cities live in. Instead tenants are stuck because there are no viable alternatives on the market, and some landlords shamelessly exploit that.

[antisthenes]

What's your address and how soon can I move in?

DM is okay, if you don't want to post it on the internet.

[orestarod]

Why should they welcome you in the house they use to LIVE in? As opposed a house they use to make money out of, without contributing anything to society, like landlords do?

[eadmund]

Landlords contribute plenty to society: they provide optionality. Without landlords, folks would be forced to pay or borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars ahead of time to build or purchase homes[0]; they would be forced to incur more severe transaction costs (having to sell) when moving; they would be forced to find the funds to handle maintenance issues; they would be forced to have a significant portion of their net worth tied up in housing. A tenant avoids all of that: he only has to make a relatively small deposit; he can leave relatively quickly and easily; he can rely on someone else to handle maintenance; he doesn’t care if housing prices decrease. Those benefits are not free, of course: they cost money, because they have value.

Indeed, given how many people flat-out couldn’t afford to buy in a world without landlords, landlords prevent homelessness. Just like farmers, distributors and grocers prevent starvation.

[antisthenes]

There are plenty of live-in landlords that rent rooms to people and live in the same house.

Many renter commenters assume that anyone owning a house automatically owes the society to provide housing to those that don't. Of course such people don't actually like taking care of the house or pretend that depreciation and maintenance don't exist.

You should probably fix that also, no? Unless you want all housing to look like abandoned blocks in Detroit.

[BasedAnon]

I'm kind of tired of this thinly-veiled socialist sentiment.

[aaomidi]

Then offer a proper argument that supports making profit off of owning property.

[BasedAnon]

i have the power to do so, and i like to do so, so i will do so. what's your argument for stopping me?

[blcknight]

My experience with debt collectors is they don’t act rationally and once they’re able to find someone they harass you using any means necessary. The fear of being fired is a good motivator to get people to pay.

[oceanghost]

Precisely.

I got a new land-line-number in the early 2000s. One day, I got a collection call for someone with a Mexican surname. I explained I had just gotten the number and I didn't know who that person was. So naturally, they called twice a day for months. I disconnected the line because I was basically paying $20/m for them to harass me. And here's the part I can't explain-- even after being disconnected, the phone would ring but only for the debt collector.

EDIT:

Another story. Solar Panels in the late early 2010s. The ex-wife's father died years ago, once or twice a week, someone would call her cell phone, ask for her dead father and then try to sell her solar panels. They would not stop. It escalated to calls 6 days a week.

I eventually got fed up and told them I'd be happy to come down there with a pistol if they kept calling. I know, not the best choice, but keep in mind this is after 6 months of daily harassment.

The guy on the other end of the phone flipped out, told me “I was committing a federal crime, and he was going to report me to the police and to expect them shortly.” Then, as an intimidation tactic, he read my full name and address-- except it was my dead FILs information.

I told him to go ahead and put his name on a police report so I knew his name.

The calls stopped for one month, and then started again.

[FreshStart]

It's basically stalking made a profession.. So it draws a certain crowd.

[PartiallyTyped]

I mean they are extorting your livelihood. I think that’s pretty up there in terms of scummy behaviour.

[jancsika]

> Even from a purely self serving perspective, why would they do this?

Because nearly nothing in the world works on the level of individually self-serving, containerized ideas which have direct one-to-one causes and effects.

As an exercise, instead imagine these companies operating on high latency, realtime digital signal graphs running at low sample rates.

Say one of those companies' graphs needs to operate on an incoming stream of 10,000 samples. The company obviously desires the highest frequencies to pass into the "payment received" output.

So they add an "anger-the-boss" filter into the signal chain.

There aren't just direct consequences here-- each change causes a rippling effect for the consequent samples. And that rippling effect clearly changes the behavior of some consequent victims. For example, if victims already heard about these nasty tactics and they want to keep their current job, they might decide to pay if those tactics are still being used.

It probably doesn't get the optimal output for the company. But the article talks about how a 1% change in payment rates can be the difference between success and bankruptcy. Like most realtime systems, they don't have the luxury of screwing around with potentially better outcomes if it ever means missing deadlines for paying the company's bills.

You'd probably drive yourself crazy thinking of all human affairs as low-latency DSP graphs. But I would propose doing the exercise however long it takes to get rid of the pattern of reflexively approaching any new social puzzle by positing a perfectly self-interested and self-contained individual sample.

[iamdbtoo]

I think part of it is simply competition against other collection efforts. The scariest collector will probably get paid before the others.

[tzs]

> If your boss gets mad that you have bad debt and fires you, then it’s now even less likely that you will be paying off the debt, no?

It might increase the chances that when you get another job you will agree to start making payments on the debt so that they won't get you fired from that job too.

[ta20230813]

> I got kicked out for being gay with no notice and had no savings.

Same, in December 2002. Feels a little strange how it works now, compared to be drug out of the barracks by MPs like a criminal. The Army never apologizes.

[warner25]

I'm curious about this. 2002 was before my time, and DADT was mostly before my time, but I've overseen a couple dozen administrative separations for other things (ranging from actual criminal conduct to repeated fitness test failures) as a platoon leader and commander, and I've never seen anything like this.

The bureaucracy will drag out any separation action for months; like at a minimum it will include a series of formal counseling statements by your first-line supervisor and commander, visits to Trial Defense Services, and mental and physical health assessments that take weeks to schedule.

Even in cases of actual criminal conduct, the MPs are very rarely involved. A first-line supervisor NCO would handle the task of escorting the person to their appointments and pulling guard duty if there were some restrictions in place (also rare).

Is there more to these stories?

[blcknight]

Yea it’s still not fully accepting but nobody’s kicked out anymore. I know I’ll never get an apology. The US doesn’t apologize.

I do see the occasional person bringing their SO to the Navy and Marine balls.

[coldtea]

>Another called me work repeatedly and told my boss

This, in a functional legal system, should have them immediately arrested and/or slapped with a fine.

[AlexandrB]

It probably doesn't matter how functional the legal system is, these kinds of operators will always find grey areas where what they're doing is not technically illegal but still makes your life harder.

[coldtea]

Then the law should enumerate very specific actions that only those are allowed (e.g. sending you an email or calling your director home or mobile number only, and only, say, once a month). Anything else should be punishible.

Or the law could get a little more flexible and punish them for their intent, even if what they do is a "gray" area.

Or it could also make "collection agencies" illegal in their entirety.

The other side can just inform you of your debt, once, and if you fail to comply within a legally mandated deadline, they can go through the courts if they want to pursue it further. Who said "debt collecting" companies should be a thing?

[antisthenes]

The law about collections has been trending towards "only this is allowed" for a long time.

It takes time for the legal system to set precedents and create a legal body of work around issues like these. It moves very slow.

Thankfully, at least for medical debt, there are pretty harsh laws against collections.

[blcknight]

Well I sued and got paid, but it wasn’t easy. I’m sure it didn’t change their behavior. They know most won’t sue. The guy who did it is still there working, I looked him up on LinkedIn.

Finding consumer lawyers willing to take FDCPA cases is tough.