Major Credit Card Bank Stops All Credit Card Lawsuits

CBSnews.com recently reported JPMorgan Chase & Co. has stopped filing credit card lawsuits around the country to collect credit card debt.
The American Banker reported on Jan. 10, 2012 Chase had shut down a national collections operations responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly judgments.

Credit card lawsuits are debt collector threats that can be defeated even if you do owe.

In April 2011 the Wall Street Journal first reported that Chase had stopped filing credit card debt lawsuits in Dade County, Florida.
CBS News speculates that the homeowner foreclosure illegal robo-signing of documents may also be a problem for bank credit card debt documentation. “In a federal whistle-blower complaint filed last year, a former vice president of JPMorgan, who worked on sales of overdue credit-card loads, alleged that bank employees robo-signed paperwork used to see legal judgments against card users.”

According to the American Banker story, a Chase collection attorney, who was fired with many other in-house debt collectors, speculated that fired employees could not testify when the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency investigated possible fraudulent documentation of debts at Chase.
In the past few years fraudulent documentation of credit card debt by junk debt buyers and their collection attorneys for the purposes of winning court judgments against credit card debtors has been brought to light by the Wall Street Journal, Baltimore Sun and other publications.

The Journal and the Minnesota Attorney General reported it was the business plan of Encore Capital Group to final credit card debt lawsuits in large numbers and wait for most debtors to default, doing nothing further and providing no documentation to any debtors who answered their summonses.

The New York Times reported in April 2010 that debt collection attorneys expect a large number of people to default and not appear to defend themselves in a debt collection lawsuits.
A few years ago most courts gave debt collection attorneys the run of the court to collect credit card debt from “guilty” debtors. Today, it is a different story, “guilty” credit card debtors can win by demanding debt collection attorneys prove they owe the alleged debt with proper documentation.
Readers can consult my Credit Card Debt Survival Guide for the proper way to demand documentation of an alleged debt when answering credit card lawsuits.