     michelle l belanger (Mlyn) | Thursday, June 15, 2000 - 05:25 am 
I posted a few months back WRT Creditrust and got no response. Interestingly enough, they never bothered to respond to my request for proof that the debt was even mine, but that is another story. So to is the fact that they are now apparently about to cease to be a viable entity, with the stock going from $30+ last summer to around 50 cents a share. The following appeared in the CRDT message board on yahoo but thought it may be of interest here...
7 sue Creditrust claiming it deceived them on collections
Specialist in credit risks is sued for $14 million
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By Bill Atkinson
Sun Staff
Seven individuals have filed separate lawsuits against Creditrust Corp. and its chairman, alleging that the company used deceptive and illegal collection
practices to coax them into paying off delinquent loans.
Combined, the lawsuits, which were filed in Baltimore City Circuit Court Monday evening, seek about $14 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
Baltimore-based Creditrust, which is struggling to raise badly needed capital, manages more than 2 million in delinquent credit-card accounts with a face
value of $4.9 billion. The company was founded in 1991 by Joseph K. Rensin, who is chairman.
"We have no reason to believe that these allegations are true and we will vigorously defend these actions," Thomas A. Henning, Creditrust's general counsel.
The lawsuits allege Creditrust employees violated Maryland consumer protection law by advising individuals that if they made installment payments on their
debt, their poor credit ratings would be wiped clean.
Creditrust had "no intention to actually remove the derogatory credit ratings" and had no authority to change the ratings, the lawsuits said. The suits also allege
that individuals were "coerced" to to pay off the credit-card loans by using other cards or refinancing their homes.
Creditrust employees worked to persuade the individuals to pay even though the statute of limitations to collect on the debt had expired, the lawsuits state.
Originally published on Jun 14 2000 |
| michelle l belanger (Mlyn) | Thursday, June 15, 2000 - 01:24 pm
Creditrust has rapidly become an apparent example of how *not* to run a business. They tried to cover up an internal embezzlement (and never sought to have charges pressed by all accounts I have seen) last December. They are apparently in default on some of their own financial agreements and are now pinning their hopes on postings made by someone on the yahoo board. There was, according to the lawsuit filed by CRDT against EFS, a high-ranking EFS employee who breached a fiduciary confidence. CRDT is seeking some exhorbitant sum, and it is the hope of getting any money back that has apparently kept the stock at the 50 cent level instead of going to zilch.
Gotta admit that the irony is sorta thick...a collection company in technical default on their own loans. :D
I didn't have any interest in watching them go down the tubes until they got into my life with a debt that wasn't mine in the first place (and which has never appeared on a credit report in the eight or nine years that they claim I have owed the money. My last contact with them was sometime in March, when they signed for the letter seeking documentation of the claim. |
