“Debts are conveyed to the debt buyers as large CSV files with minimal supporting documentation.”
Charged-off card debt sells for about 5 cents on the dollar a few months in, and the median default is between $500 and $1,000. At that price nobody reads the contract, so buyers often cannot produce the verification the law requires. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act dates to 1978 and the abuses it targets are still the business model. The industry runs on faxes, post-it notes and debts made up from scratch.