Fight Back Against Unfair Debt Collection Practices: Know Your Rights and Protect Yourself from Threats, Lies, and Intimidation

11. Strengths and Weaknesses

Sometimes, a debtor’s circumstances have a special bearing on how their account will be treated. Toward the end of one week, I got a promise to pay from an Army noncommissioned officer in Arizona. He admitted to having been “young and foolish” when he ran up the credit card years before. Since then, the debt had dogged him, popping up each time he was stationed in a new location. My collection call, in fact, was the first “incoming” that he had received on this old debt since recently returning stateside, he said, adding that he had spent the past seven months in Iraq.

Whatever you think about the war, it is natural to feel gratitude, or at least sympathy, toward an individual soldier who has put his or her life ...