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Chris Sourovelis has never had any trouble with the law or been accused of any crime. But that hasn’t stopped the City of Philadelphia from trying to take his home.The Sourouvelis family, along with thousands of others in Philadelphia, is living a Kafkaesque nightmare: Their property is considered guilty; they must prove their innocence and the very prosecutors they’re fighting can profit from their misery. Now the Institute for Justice has filed a major class-action lawsuit to end these abuses of power.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/institut...ction-lawsuit/ -
Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
The bullying power of both government and large corporations has never been more flagrant since the days of the Robber Barons. I'd like to see more lawsuits to stop this kind of thing. We've almost come to expect it from government, but corporations today have taken a lesson from organized crime and have learned that the little guy has a hard time fighting back on his own. It's now very routine for companies to apply bogus charges to customer's bills, threaten to ruin their credit if they don't pay, and basically just extort money from the customer. The recent incident of the Comcast phone agent badgering a customer who wanted to cancel is typical. I get a $7 charge added to my internet provider bill every month, that I do not owe,for a modem. I bought my own and have the receipt. They will remove the charge if I physically take the receipt down to their office( won't allow a fax or email). Of course the next month the same charge is applied again! My wife was there to have the charge removed and several others were there for the same thing while she was there. These are not simple mistakes. They are deliberate policy made by executives desperate to make sales numbers and get their bonuses. And there is no apparatus in place to stop it. There used to be a time when our govt would help protect us from this kind of thing, but today they are in bed with each other.Last edited by flintlock; August 27, 2014, 10:21 AM. -
Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
Since your internet bill is NOT tax deductible, and the profits of the internet company are, this sort of sets up a perverse incentive for the gvt not to do anything. Where I used to work we would call this a revenue enhancement scheme. Same goes for income inequality. With lots of rich folks who pay 35%, why does the gvt want more middle class an poor folks paying 25, 15, 10 or zero? The rich (crony capitalists), who have been given a license to steal don't seem to mind either
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Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
The sound like its just as good as private prisons.Comment
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Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
This is not "little known" it's widely known, the public just thinks that only those who "deserve it" end up losing stuff and as the public is wont to do they just don't care about what happens to "other people". This started way back in the Reagan years.Without any prior notice, police evicted the Sourovelises and seized the house, using a little-known law known as “civil forfeiture.”
Americans are highly tolerant of stupid ideas that they think won't hurt themselves. Few people I know would even give a moments consideration to all of the abuse fostered by civil forfeiture "laws". Even the marijuana friendly Democrats don't seem to care. They think that "legalization" will fix this.
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I worked with a guy in North Carolina who went to the auctions where they sell this stuff. Even after I told him how the stuff was "acquired" he didn't care, he was getting good "deals".Last edited by LorenS; August 27, 2014, 11:32 AM.Comment
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Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
i'd offer that... 'is this a surprise' ? - or maybe a couple of questions about how and who runs philly - and for how long now ?? - or that it was with 'big margin' but with the lowest voter turnout since the 1951 ?? -
even IF it sounds like hizzhonor is trying to do the right things??
or if 'any hope for change' is even possible?
but... like the place(s) i'm oh-so-familiar with, its somewhat pointless....Comment
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Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
Recently I got a collections notice in the mail for a parking ticket I didn't remember getting. It said I was past the final notice and the account had gone into collections. When I looked into it, the ticket was given to a car from three states away. Clearly not my car. This explains why I never got the first, second, or third notice. It went to another address since the car wasn't registered to me.Originally posted by flintlock View Post
Somehow, between the case going to court and someone from three states away not showing up, and them sending it to collections, the ticket got assigned to me.
Now, the ticket itself was from a couple of years ago...I think 2012? But the collections notice was from May. It took me a 50 mile trip to court, a trip to the DMV, and a trip to Staples Fax Center to get the court to agree that the car wasn't mine. Good. That much was done. And the DMV surprisingly had no wait.
The collections notice was still on my credit report. By now this is call 5. I'd go down there, but they're in Wisconsin, and that's more of a flight than a drive. They answer right away, but when they realize you're not calling to just cough up cash, you get put on hold for quite a while waiting for someone with authority and/or a brain. They say they need notice from the Court.
I e-mail the Court. They finally sent the notice over to them. So the collections agency waved the fee to zero. But they didn't take the damn collections notice off my credit report, which was the main reason I had gone through all this BS in the first place.
They told me I had to snail-mail my license, registration to my car (not the car with the ticket), and the court notice to the collections agency and wait 4 to 6 weeks for processing. Fine. What could I do? They had me.
Okay. Fine. Now I'm way more than the $90 the collections bill began with in time and gas and stamps and DMV fees and faxes and shoe-leather. But I'm fixated on getting this damn thing off my credit report.
So I call them up 4 to 6 weeks in. 6th call. I actually get a guy who seems to want to help me out for the first time. He goes to talk to some manager. It takes a good long while. Finally he tells me they've sent notices to the credit agencies. But they can take 4 to 6 weeks too. I have no way to confirm or deny this. They demand all sorts of proof from me, including my license, registration for a car not associated with the ticket in question, court documents, etc. etc. But they won't give me anything but verbal confirmation over the phone that proves they asked the credit agencies to wipe the collections notice off.
I wait. Time goes by. It's now August. I go to look into it again. $10 later, I find out that they did indeed remove it from two of the three credit rating bureaus. But not the third. They left it there. I call the damn collections agency again for the 7th time. They're unhelpful. Now it's time to file a dispute.
I go and scan in all the damn documents from this whole ordeal. By now the file has grown. I hop on Adobe Pro and OCR them and reduce quality so they fit the 2MB limit the damn web form has for uploads. I condense my story to 200 words as they require. Only the facts and key dates. Parking ticket. Date. Not mine. Registration. Court agrees. Date. Collections agency waved to zero. Date. Please remove.
Finally the damn thing's gone, and my credit rating is back up about 100 points to where it was in April.
They suck. It's always the bottom line, but sometimes I think it's also computer systems that put you on an automated hell. Then they won't even accept e-mail. But if it wasn't for computer systems, I don't know how they would have assigned someone else's parking ticket to me. They also have meter maids with automatic ticket machines. Another time, I went out to move the car from a 2hr max spot, and realized I got a ticket from the future. That's when I realized it was Daylight Savings and they hadn't set the clock back. I had 45 minutes until the ticket was supposedly issued. I drove right to the damn municipal court went to clerk and said, "Hey, I've got a ticket from the future." It had been happening all day. It was just waved. A few minutes later, and it wouldn't have been.
Computers, man. They let mistakes like this happen that are unarguable. Everything's understaffed to the point it's bare bones. Nobody at all is assigned to quality control. Just wring them out for money. And if they fight long and hard enough and spend enough, then finally give in. But not until they're at the point of murderous rage.
I always got the same way with the cable bill. So I got rid of cable and internet at home. I got the same way with the cell phone bill. BS charges out of nowhere. Quit AT&T, went to Verizon. Same contract. Same excess charges BS and scams. Same monopoly/oligopoly. So I quit them too. But I had to have a cell phone. I need it to work. So I found Republic and got on a no contract flat monthly fee unlimited data/call/text deal. I've been very happy with it thus far.
I own everything I have outright except one thing and it's driving me mad. The Propane tank. I'm in an old house off the heating grid. Oil for heat, but propane for stove/hot water/dryer. The propane companies around here are all crooked as hell. There are only 4 of them to choose from. They get you into a two year contract to "rent the tank," all the while you have to buy exclusively from them. And the contract doesn't list the per-gallon price, because it floats at "market rate" depending on "usage statistics." What that means is that if you use a lot of the crap and you're a big account like a restaurant, you'll pay $2 per gallon. If you only use a little bit, you'll pay $6 for that same gallon. One popular thing to do seems to be to get you to sign the two year contract by giving out the first tank pretty cheap, then jacking up the rate to $6 per gallon on the second delivery, and charing both a contract cancellation fee and a tank removal fee that add up to $1,000 to keep you captive. The worst part is, no company who delivers to this area will deliver to a tank you own yourself. They cite "safety reasons," so there's no way to get out of the two-year contracts. I got together with a group of folks from just up the way who had had it with these practices that just really got going 10 years ago. Mostly it was old-timers who used it for whole house heating and were cold and couldn't afford $650 per fill up. We tried to get something done. Had a bill in the legislature and everything. Only tried to make them service safe tanks owned by customers and advertise a daily per gallon rate for everybody. The bill went nowhere. Propane lobby's smarter and tougher and eviler than Hank Hill.
Oh wait, no, there's one more that has me. The gym. Random facilities upgrade fees or other things just come right out of my checking account. No way to pay up front in cash for a month or a year. Have to let them have the digits. Then they mild it and start with the fees.
I hate, hate, HATE service contracts. With every fiber in my being. They should be illegal. At the very least, they should have to offer you a cash-up-front service option where what you pay for the term of the contract is paid up front in one lump and there's no BS hidden charges after that.
Because a service contract is too tempting for any for-profit company. They've got you locked in. Now they can milk you. And of course they will. They operate for profit. They'd be negligent not to screw over all their customers once they have them locked in for two years.
So why are these things legal? Who have you ever met that had a good time with cell phone or cable or other service contract bills? They're always a god-forsaken nightmare.
Nickeled and Dimed, man. And sorry for the rant Flintlock. I think I'm still a little shell-shocked from this parking ticket fiasco.Last edited by dcarrigg; August 27, 2014, 11:36 AM.Comment
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Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
no sweat - and nice job! ('you know me' - eye love/live for this kinda stuff ;)Originally posted by dcarrigg View Post
i got one for ya....
but gonna hafta wait til i get it sorted out, lest something else happen before i do....Comment
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Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
Speaking of collections. My dad has Alzheimers and I'm trying to work with a collections agency for some of his bills. They won't mail me an itemized bill "we sent one to your dad". Well, duh, but dad isn't handling his bills for a reason. They won't mail a bill to me and they won't let me change dad's address.
It's tempting to let it go and let the dim-witts collect from the estate.
Meanwhile Ocwen, my mortgage company continues to refuse to relinquish the escrow account on my mortgage even though they pay my insurance late every year. It is fraud plain and simple to misuse my escrow money like this.Comment
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Re: Philadelphia Earns Millions By Seizing Cash And Homes From People Never Charged With A Crime
methinks this must be what 'the last days of rome' was like, as more and more of the otherwise well-intentioned got caught up in the orgy of (political) corruption that ultimately took em down...Originally posted by LorenS View Post
meanwhile, 'the band/bread-n-circus played on...'Comment
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