What is Zombie Debt?

Interview with Pat Lester, Attorney at Lester and Associates

What is zombie debt?

Zombie debt or scavenger debt happens like this. Let’s say you had a credit card and you fell behind on your payments. The credit card company charged off your account which means they wrote it off. They gave up. They stopped collecting from you. Or you went bankrupt on the debt. Either way then years go by, 3, 5 maybe even 10.

Enter the zombie debt buyer. We call them zombie debts because they are dead debts. They buy the debts and bring them back to life, so to speak. The credit card company sells yours and thousands of other peoples accounts to one of these scavengers for about about 2-3 cents on the dollar. Lets say you had a $1000 balance on your card this other company probably bought it for about $20 and now they are suing you for the full balance on the card plus interest they added on plus their attorney fees. From a legal argument, because they won’t or can’t prove they bought the debt, they can’t prove anything in court and therefore they’re not entitled to anything.

It’s important to understand that they aren’t collecting to pay back the credit card company. Even if you pay the scavenger the credit card company gets none of the money … nothing. The zombie scavenger keeps every nickel they collect.

What can a lawyer do?

In two words, defend you.

We force them to prove their case.  No negotiating. No you make monthly payments. No asking them to reduce the balance.  I tell them they get nothing.  They don’t get one penny of your hard earned money.

How can you do that?

Well in a nutshell, when they sue you for this money the odds are very good that they don’t have proof that they bought the debt or that you owe the original debt. They also often misrepresent the amount, character or legal status of the debt and/or sue after the statute of limitations has run. Even worse sometimes they sue people who never even had the credit card! All of these things may very well violate a federal law called the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.  That law is designed to protect consumers like you from collection companies that violate the law. Most collection companies are legitimate businesses that play by the rules. But if they aren’t and the judge agrees with us that they violated this law, the judge can make them pay a fine of up to $1000.

So what do you do?

I turn the tables on them. They start out suing you, but by the time the case is over I’m asking them to kill the debt they resurrected and write you a check for violating the law. Now I should let you know that the attorney’s professional licensing rules do not allow attorneys to promise an outcome on a case, so I can’t guarantee that we’ll win and likewise past performance is not a guarantee of future performance.  What that means is even if I’ve won every case like yours in the past that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to win your case. No client of mine that has been sued by these zombie debt scavengers for old credit card debt has ever paid one penny to a debt collections company, ever.  So when I tell you that I feel very confident that can successfully represent you with regards to this case, I mean it.