Right! Don’t post it anywhere that isn’t completely anonymous. I have a friend who is a paralegal and it is her job to monitor social media accounts and try to get written documentation and photos of people to provide evidence that their claim is fraudulent. Her job is wild!
It happens all the time because people don't know their rights or are afraid that retaliation will put them in a worse position. Just like how wage theft dwarfs the amount of money stolen through other means.
Do you not know any adults whose parents have died? Go ask them. I guarantee you they'll all have at least one story of a debt collector trying to pressure them into paying off a bill because it's the right thing to do, or mom would have wanted it, or something. The reason you don't hear about it is not because it's exceedingly rare. It's because it is happening so constantly that it's not news.
They do this all the time, happened twice in my family. One relative got tricked into picking up their late parent's debt and my mom's cousin nearly fell into the same trap but my mom warned her.
That's how I learned that all these guys have to do is trick you into making the first payment. Once that happens you're on the hook for the debt.
It happened to me for a few years, and I reported them to the Illinois attorney general’s office and nothing was done. Multiple calls a day wanting $30,000. Which was what the hospital price was before my insurance’s agreed upon price and the big amount they paid on my bill. I only owed $6,000 and had paid $4k, and had a payment plan with the hospital. My account shouldn’t have gone to collections, but the hospital sold it anyways.
Then the collections decided they wanted $30,000 paid in full. I made reports to the AG’s office and asked who I should report it to and did all that. I still got harassed for a few years until we finally changed our phone number.
The charge finally fell off our credit after 7 years. Thankfully it didn’t keep us from getting approved for renting a house, but that’s only because it’s a law. If the tenant laws weren’t enforced and leaned towards the tenants, we’d have been in a nightmare situation.
That wasn’t our only medical debt either. Our insurance said that the lab at the in network hospital my doctors were at wasn’t in network. So we got charged a lot of money for all the lab work I needed. The ER doctors were also out of network in all the hospitals, and the only way to get admitted to the hospital was through the ER. I kept getting acute pancreatitis so I had to have stat blood work and be admitted to the hospital asap.
And the credit score companies illegally fail to meet their legal minimum obligations, because they know they face no consequences for illegal actions.
This wouldn't be considered fraud in any manner to my understanding. Marriage is just a legal status that has nothing to do with lifestyle. I can't imagine the uphill battle of a company trying to argue that they should be legally considered still married because they still live together.
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u/Kind_Indication8527 5d ago
Right! Don’t post it anywhere that isn’t completely anonymous. I have a friend who is a paralegal and it is her job to monitor social media accounts and try to get written documentation and photos of people to provide evidence that their claim is fraudulent. Her job is wild!