For many years I have been advocating suing your way to good credit. The core essays that later became the Flyingifr Method of Aggressive Credit Repair on Debtorboards first appeared here on Credit Net. In response to the litigiousness of some consumers, an enterprising company is now offering collectors a database of FDCPA Plaintiffs so that the collectors can "scrub" their debtor lists against the FDCPA Plaintiff list and remove the known litigious FDCPA Plaintiffs from their Debtor Lists. This amounts to a FDCPA lawsuit becoming a ticket to get a "Get Out of Debt Free" card, since the JDB using this service would rather go after the easy mark than someone who will fight them in Court and sue them in return. This is the post I put on Debtorboards: Here's the link to the entire thread: http://debtorboards.com/smf/index.php?topic=4478.0
At a subscription cost of about $1500 a year if it saves them from just one FDCPA suit it has paid for itself. Of course, we get the benefits for free.
You have the right... I like this part: Boy, how unfair to have to deal with the consumer who knows and exercises their rights under the law. I'm not encouraging nor supporting fraudulent abuses, but I can't help but laugh at the irony.
Get out of debt free, eh? Sounds great on the surface of it but the reality is far from that. First of all I'll need some causes of action. Those aren't all that hard to come up with provided I know FDCPA, FCRA, maybe TILA and more. Then I will have to use one or more of those laws to set a trap for them to fall into. That's going to require one or more certified mail return receipt letters at $5.00 each. Next I will have to find a competent attorney, an almost impossible feat to accomplish in itself or I will have to learn how to write up a case, learn the rules of civil procedure, rules of evidence and do the research to come up with case cites to show the court how other courts have ruled in similar situations and be certain that those cases I choose to cite are from courts of the same or higher jurisdiction so the judge is at least somewhat bound to use them in deciding the case. I'm going to have to also set up and go to my Rule 26 hearing. I'm going to want to depose my victim and I'm going to want a court reporter at the deposition. So I'll have to learn how to do depositions and I"m going to have to pay for that court reporter and the resulting transcript. I'm going to have to pay the court filing fees of $350 plus the cost of service of summons which will bring the total to almost $360.00 Then I'm going to have to pay to subscribe to Pacer and whatever fees I might incur for access to the records in the case. Then what am I going to get out of it if I win? Maybe anything from $1.00 plus court costs on up to whatever the court will allow and that is going to depend on how well I have prepared and argued my case as well as how solid my proofs are. And what if I lose and they make me pay the defendant's attorney fees at several hundred dollars an hour? What was that you said about "get out of debt free"? Now then, I'm not trying to talk anybody out of filing a federal case at every opportunity. I strongly advocate that they do but it sure isn't any get out of debt free card. While I certainly applaud you for your find, I just can't seem to get the idea out of my head that you are announcing it here as a means to get more people to go visit your board hoping to find all the information they would need to get the job done and their creditor/CA off their backs. And that isn't going to happen either, is it?
Cap1 - If getting people to visit my board was the reason for this thread I simply would have stated the statement and linked to my board - not include the entire post from my board verbatim. As far as the "free" portion - you are right - it's not exactly free, but a whole lot cheaper than just paying the debts. But then again, the service in question does require a person to have filed a FDCPA suit. Obviously there are costs to that, and it certainly helps to have documented violations. As far as finding an attorney is concerned, I have never needed one and with some research on the web most people should be able to bring an action pro se. As far as people coming to my board to research all this, that is the niche my board fills - it is a research tool first and a message board second. It is not designed to take the place of any of the other consumer boards, but to supplement them by placing in one place links to the laws, courts, court rules and other resources. It is not competition. If it were I would have kept this information over there.
Most people who owe money are not interested in what is cheaper. They know they owe the debt and they want to pay what they legitimately owe. Cheaper isn't what is uppermost in their minds. What is uppermost in their minds varies widely from person to person. For most it is a simple morals issue although at the same time they may also be motivated with needing to clean up their credit so they can buy a home or a car or get a credit card of some type. Sadly, most people think that by paying what they owe to a debt collecter they will somehow clean up their credit. Nothing could be further from the truth in most cases. Filing federal lawsuits against an abusive debt collector is probably one of the surest ways to get it off one's credit reports. But it won't happen even then unless removal of the tradeline is stipulated in the settlement agreement. You may be surprised to learn that you are not "most people" and that most people are frightened out of their wits at the mere thought of even going into a courtroom no matter how well prepared they are. They want no part of that. Too bad there aren't hundreds or even thousands of people like the following: For the first 5 months of this year, Mr. David M. Larson of Colorado Springs, CO, had the distinction of filing more FDCPA cases than any other attorney with at least 72 of them. Mr. Brian P. Parker of The law Offices of Brian Parker in Bingham Farms,MI had the distinction of filing at least 51 of them. Honorable Mention goes to Ms. Bonnie C. Dragotto, an associate with the firm of Gomolinski and Philipps in Palos Hill IL, was a close second with at least 37 that she filed in Indiana and Illinois. Mr. Kenneth Hiller of Buffalo, New York also receives recognition for filing at least 33 FDCPA cases from January through May of this year. It is obvious that most if not all of the people mentioned above are attorneys, not pro se litigants. And the list don't even start to be complete. What about David Szwak, Robert Hyde, and the rest of a long list of advocacy attorneys who aren't on the list yet but probably will be soon enough? Where are the pro se litigants that have successfully filed suits against abusive debt collectors? You and I both know of many who have been successful. So how many people do you know of who are members of your board that deserve to be on the list but aren't yet? What I fail to understand is why they claim to expose debtors who have filed lawsuits against debt collectors but only show attorneys on their list so far. Seems to me they ought to have a list of debt collectors and how many times they have been sued too.
Priorities RE: I guess it makes more sense to avoid the consumers and attorneys who know and exercise their rights under the law than to clean up their acts and comply with the law. However, to be fair, it's sort of like selling radar detectors. If you always drive at or below the speed limit, you wouldn't need to know if there's a "smoky" hiding around the next corner. With a radar detector, you know when you can "push it." This service is sort of like a "law suit detector" for the CAs. It really is a jungle out there.
Consumers also need their lawsuit radar detector to see which collection agencies have been sued and how many times. Don't really see that it would do much good though. Most people who are being foreclosed on won't even file a lawsuit against either their lender or the attorney regardless of the fact that doing so would most likely prevent the foreclosure. While they wouldn't get their home for free, they very well might be able to reach a settlement whereby the lender agrees to take their arrearage and put it on the back end of the note instead of foreclosing and they might even get the amount of their arrerage forgiven entirely. Still they won't sue even to keep their homes.
This is a project in progress at Debtorboards right now. Right you are, and the collection industry depends on 99% of the people they target lying down like doormats. Look at it this way - before boards like CN, AoC, DB and the others, that was pretty close to 100%. Now, apparently, enough people are standing up to them that it's getting annoying enough for some CA's to consider simply ignoring the litigious ones and concentrate on the doormats. All we at the Boards can do is help those who choose to fight back get the information they need to do it.
And where do you propose to get the funding necessary to cover all 91 federal court districts? One person isn't going to get that done in a month and the pacer costs will run pretty high too. Even if you can get the task performed it still isn't going to do a lot of good for the simple reason that what they may have been sued for may be enlightening to a pro se litigant he still can't use that information to any great advantage in any lawsuit he might file. If violations were a federal crime than a judge might use that information to help decide what sentence he would hand out but since that isn't the case, it isn't going to do a lot of good that I can see.
As I said - it's a project in progress. We are aware of the limitations are and trying to incorporate as much as we reasonably can into the database.
Lest anyone doubt the importance of standing up for your rights and fighting the creditor every step of the way, just follow this link to InsideARM, which is a trade board for the Collection industry: http://www.insidearm.com/forum/mess...714&STARTPAGE=1&CFID=1084107&CFTOKEN=99941137 The Flyingifr Method, as I stated in the beginning of this thread, appeared HERE first. many of the original posts are in the older pages.
From the link you mentioned So you obviously jumped into the conversation and claimed credit for as much as possible. Nice grandstanding act! I'll bet that not one of the 14 who won their cases or the 6 who settled never heard of you or your board. But even if all of those were members of your board, what is the purpose of trying to get bragging rights on a debt collector's forum? And what is the purpose of even talking about AOC when it is a dead forum that will probably never be revived? After all, the purported owner of that board was an active duty member of the Air Force and may have been a casualty of the Iraqi war? We don't know about that one way or the other but it is a possibility. So tell us, how many of those people did you personally teach how to prepare their defenses? By personally teach, I mean actually talk to by phone and email and help them prepare the documentation they filed? I'm betting that the correct answer is not even one. Claiming that your board influenced even one of them is one thing but actually taking them by the hand and walking them through it step by step is quite another. All the way around, the comments you made on that board simply add up to nothing more than grandstanding.
Actually, I strongly suspect (and am awaiting confirmation) that one of the $20,000 suits Go Get Them mentions was a DB member who I have personally been helping. The amount of the suit and the timing appear to be a bit more than a coincidence. I have no first-hand knowledge of the others. Considering that I have been advocating on at least 5 boards the techniques that evolved into the Flyingifr Method for at least 3-4 years now i would be surprised if your statement above was right. Read the thread - I was brought into it. My comments on the debt collector's forum are germane and to the point. This particular forum has been complaining (read that whining) about me and the Method for years. You obviously are unaware of the derivation of the term "to be AoC'd". The late AoC was the first home of the codified and unified Flyingifr Method. Derek, a frequent Collector poster on InsideARM and its predecessor, Collectionindustry.com coined the phrase to mean (as he defined it) to be sued for a frivolous FDCPA or FCRA violation". It refers to AoC being the home at the time of the Flyingifr Method. I first offered the Method to CN first but was turned down, although the principal parts of the Method appeared here first. The owner of AoC is an Israeli lawyer. I have spoken to him many times in the past, so I doubt he is an Iraq war casualty. As I stated above, I do not know their identities but I strongly suspect at least one of the larger cases I helped personally. I disagree. Everything I said was quite accurate. What I don't understand is your hostility and apparent lack of facts.
Well, considering what you posted over there in it's totality, I have to agree with you. But then all I see after visiting the link twice is your bragging about your method. Simply put, I think that advertising by the flyingifr method instead of doing it by conventional means is objectionable.
Since the Method is a series of about 45 essays I wrote over a period of several years put together into a single source in a single place and identified there as the Flyingifr Method of Aggressive Credit Repair, and it has been known as that for about 3 years now, how would you suggest I refer to it so that people would know what I am talking about and be able to find it if they so choose? And I am bragging about the Method simply because they are crying about it.
It isn't how you refer to it that matters. Call it God's gift to debtors if you wish. It is the choice of advertising methods that I find objectionable. Message boards aren't the place to advertise, except on your own board. An example of that might well be to ask yourself how many debt collectors do you see advertising their company and it's services on message boards? Not one, that's how many debt collectors there are advertising on message boards. There are many, many other ways to advertise that are much more acceptable and get much more traffic. Also, I just spent a bit of time going through Google using flyingifr as the search term and if I were trying to promote something I'd sure hate to have spent several years to get the results I saw a bit ago. We graduated from message boards to blogs and wikis and then have moved on to RSS and now the much newer social media places have taken over. Today it is social media complete with podcasts and videos and we are now launching into live video broadcasting. Why not start doing something new for a change? I can understand that quite well.
cap1- Simply put, I don't understand your hostility. You seem to think I post here to advertise my own board. I do that through my sig line where it is permitted. Any other time I mention it, the mentioning has something to do with the post and thread at hand. I have been a member of CN for more than 4 years longer than you have. Maybe I simply have something to say, and your snipes don't diminish it any.
Simply put, I must agree with you. And again I want to thank you for the great link you posted at the top of this thread. It was a good one indeed.
