Bring Out Your Dead

[Munger]

Obscenity.

Dozens of specially trained agents work on the third floor of DCM Services here, calling up the dear departed’s next of kin and kindly asking if they want to settle the balance on a credit card or bank loan, or perhaps make that final utility bill or cellphone payment.

The people on the other end of the line often have no legal obligation to assume the debt of a spouse, sibling or parent. But they take responsibility for it anyway.

“I am out of work now, to be honest with you, and money is very tight for us,” one man declared on a recent phone call after he was apprised of his late mother-in-law’s $280 credit card bill. He promised to pay $15 a month.

Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting, and one of the healthiest parts of the industry. Those who dun the living say that people are so scared and so broke it is difficult to get them to cough up even token payments.

Collecting from the dead, however, is expanding. Improved database technology is making it easier to discover when estates are opened in the country’s 3,000 probate courts, giving collectors an opportunity to file timely claims. But if there is no formal estate and thus nothing to file against, the human touch comes into play.

New hires at DCM train for three weeks in what the company calls “empathic active listening,” which mixes the comforting air of a funeral director with the nonjudgmental tones of a friend. The new employees learn to use such anger-deflecting phrases as “If I hear you correctly, you’d like...”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/bu...d.html?_r=1&hp

[doom&gloom]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead

Ha ha! mY mother-in-law died and a few collectors tried that one on me.
Told them politiely to get lost, I was not responsible. One kept pushing
so I told that one to not so politely F**K OFF. No more calls.

[Shakespear]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead

I kind of like the Title of the thread and will bring this dead to the forefront of our consciousness.

It is good to look back

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/business/23hedge.html

I know most people already know this but that photo shot was so similar to the photos of Paulson when asking for the bailout that I could not resist to share it.

[petertribo]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead

Dead people are the newest frontier in debt collecting...

So, not only do we have deadbeats, we now also have beatdeads.

Anyone receiving a call like this might consider answering:
"Oh, haven't you heard, he's been found alive----IN THE CAYMANS!"

[Sapiens]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead

[Munger]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead

Can you imagine a Bankster promising to pay the debts of a dead family member? Reinforces the anecdotal evidence from Hudson's piece:

I learned the reality a few years ago in London, talking to a commercial bank strategist there.

“We’ve had an intellectual breakthrough,” he said. “It’s changed our credit philosophy.”

“What is it?” I asked, imagining that he was about to come out with yet a new junk mathematics formula?

"The poor are honest,” he said, accompanying his words with his jaw dropping open as if to say, “Who could have guessed?”

The meaning was clear enough. The poor pay their debts as a matter of honor, even at great personal expense. Unlike Donald Trump, the poor are less likely to walk away from their homes when market prices sink below the mortgage level. In today’s neoliberal Chicago School language, the poor behave “uneconomically.” That is, they make choices that do not make economic sense, but rather reflect a group morality. This sociological gullibility is what made them rich pickings for predatory lenders such as Countrywide, Wachovia and Citibank.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article21969.htm

[petertribo]

Re: Bring Out Your Dead

Excellent video. I guess if the Government would drop that 9 pence subsidy to 1 pence, there would be less deaths or, should I say, murders.

There was a true story a number of years ago about a cemetery in CA (where else?) which went like this:
They ran out of burial space. What to do?
They decided that most folks do not visit often graves.
They started double burying.
They would remove the monument from a grave and put that in storage.
They crushed down the contents of that grave and then had a new burial.
The new monument would remain in place.
When someone came to visit a removed monument, they would stall the visit.
They would remove the new monument and replace it with the old monument from storage. Visit successful.

Then there was another guy in CA who got into the discount cremation biz. He lowballed his competition and went high volume. Well, you know, the quality is just not there in high volume operations. He was trucking bodies about in various unsuitable vehicles. He started up an unlicensed incinerator built on the cheap. There was the old gold teeth biz of course. Then fuel was expensive so he would do multiple burns having to cram the customers in any which way including breaking limbs, etc. Then this would result in incomplete burns which created a disposal problem. Clients of course just got any old ashes, hopefully without bits in them, which were laying around. He got caught and probably went into FIRE for new work.
(If you go through a funeral home, most of them subcontract the burn.)

I once attended a funeral where a family member remained behind to make sure the funeral folks did not do the old coffin switch, that is before burying, raising an expensive coffin and switch it for a cheap one. Lots of margin on that move.

Another notorious one in the funeral biz, is the prepaid funeral where the client pays in advance for the full cost of the funeral. The funeral home may or may not lay off this "bet" with an insurance company. There have been cases where the funeral home or insurance co went belly up before the client did and the prepayment was lost.

Even in Death, there is no rest from fraud.