Four Debt Settlement Firms Sued By The State Of Illinois

The State of Illinois has recently filed lawsuits against four debt settlement firms for deceptive business practices, charging exorbitant fees, and not helping alleviate the plight of customers. City officials are also now mulling on creating legislation that would increase the penalties on abusive debt settlement companies.

According to a city official, many hard-up customers today are getting ripped off by seemingly credible debt relief outfits.

The marketing campaigns of these companies are very catchy and many people are fooled into believing that they can easily extricate themselves out of their financial bind if they just sign up with them. In reality, these companies ask substantial amounts of money from customers, but offer little or no guarantees that their problems will be resolved. Many people end up in far worse conditions than when they started.

One recent complainant is a woman from Tollhouse, California who engaged the services of a company named Guardian Credit Solution. She initially paid the company $4490.00 to do a loan modification, which she claimed they never did. She again signed up for another debt settlement program lured by the promise of a company staff that her loan modification case would be processed faster if she did so. As expected the company failed to deliver on their promise, and the woman ended up with bigger debts than when she started.

Typically, customers pay high upfront fees to debt settlement firms at the start. They would then be advised not to pay their credit card bills. Customers would then continue to pay the companies more money for the continuation of the firm’s services, leaving them with little resources to put away for settlement purposes.

As a result of their non-payment of their credit card bills, banks would charge customers with more penalty and interest fees and often times begin collection efforts, which aggravates the financial condition of customers. And even while customers are enrolled in debt settlement programs, many banks initiate lawsuits to demand for payment of their outstanding balances.

The defendants in the lawsuit filed by the State of Illinois are: 1) Orion Processing, LLC, Swiftrock Financial, Inc., Clear Your Debt, LLC, Derin Scott and Shannon Scott.; 2) DebtOne Financial and Endebt Solutions, LLC; 3) Debt Consultants of America, Inc., Robert J. Creel; 4) American Debt Arbitration of Clearwater, Glenn P. Stewart; 5) Nationwide Asset Services, Inc., William Anderson and Gary K. Brown.

All of the defendants are charged with violating the provisions of the Illinois Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act by lying to customers on the types of services they can render and offer. The state is also petitioning the court to bar the said companies from conducting business in Illinois.