Fake Lawyers = Debt Collectors + Scams

A friend of mine today told me how he was being harassed by debt collectors who are using fake names / fake personas and pretending to be fake lawyers.

It is the kind of thing you hear about in scams involving Nigerian princes.

You know the scam. They contact you offering money, then tell you to contact a lawyer who will help arrange the transaction, the (fake) lawyer then claims they can only process the transaction for a fee. Usually a ridiculous amount like $5,000.

At which point, if you actually pay them money you are clearly a gullible moron.

So the same thing is now happening with debt collector scams here in Canada.

The Canadian (assuming they are in Canada...) debt collector threatens to sue you for the debt (whether it is a real debt or just a scam) and then they "hire" a fake lawyer - who is just them using a fake name and not a real lawyer - who then proceeds to harass you with fake legal documents sent in the mail to get you to send them money in the hopes that the debt collector/fake lawyer will stop harassing you.

My friend explained that they will go to extreme lengths to make the fake lawyer look real.

They will list the fake lawyer in lawyer directories, having a website for the lawyer (which will usually be really small and incomplete), a LinkedIn account for the lawyer, etc. But if you dig deeper you will discover that the fake lawyer doesn't have a Facebook page, that there is no records of them graduating from any law school, and that the person does not exist - although they will use a common name. Not John Smith obviously, but instead will make up a name that sounds real and when googled does come up with results of people living elsewhere - but the fake lawyer in question will not exist or have the bare minimum.

• A Facebook page that was only ever used once.
• A Twitter account that is mostly empty.
• A LinkedIn account with very few colleagues / no real colleagues.
• Etc.

They will not have anything that isn't free. For example a listing in the Yellow Pages, because that costs money.

Now real lawyers do sometimes get hired to sue people for very large debts. That does happen. But when their retainer fee is $5000, you can be sure that they are not being hired to track down and harass people who have debts less than $25,000. It just isn't financially worth the trouble of suing people for small amounts when the cost of the lawyer is so much.

Imagine for example suing someone for $20,000 over a debt (a real debt) and paying the lawyer $5,000 in retainer fee. Even if they are successful in court, there is still no guarantee the person will pay them. The person could declare bankruptcy, they could move overseas and refuse to pay, they could "disappear" into northern Ontario and live in a cabin / drop off the grid for a year, etc. So the people suing would have lost $5,000 and still got nothing.

Suing people for money really only makes sense when the following criteria are met:

• The person you are suing has lots of money. Suing the poor is pointless.
• You are suing for a large amount. At least $25,000.
• The debt needs to be real. Not some phony scam.
• The debtor needs to have a contract with debtee*.

* The last one is actually really important. For example lets say someone had old credit card debt, and the credit card company sells that debt to a debt collection company for pennies on the dollar. So for example if someone owed MasterCard $20,000, MasterCard sells that debt for perhaps $200 to a debt collector. MasterCard's contract with the borrower is then finished. The borrower had a contract with MasterCard. They do not have any contract or agreement with the debt collector, which means they are under no legal obligation to pay them. The debt collector will then proceed to harass the person in hopes of making a profit off of the purchased debt. In this example, if they manage to get $400 out of the person then they just doubled their money.

And they do it via threats of legal action, fake lawyers who do not exist, fake legal documents that are not real (or filled out correctly), etc.

And in some cases debt collectors are apparently now running scams, because they have realized that the debt doesn't even need to be real. They just need to harass people until they get the money.

The whole conversation reminded me of James Veitch. A comedian who makes fun of email scams by playing along with them.







Now all joking aside...

Pretending to be a lawyer and harassing people for money. Shouldn't that be illegal?

And it is illegal. Because it is FRAUD. And possibly Grand Larceny if the amount is over a certain amount.

The problem is that the scammers / debt collectors are using fake names, and the "fake lawyer" does not exist. So how do you prove who was sending the fake legal documents and pretending to be a lawyer?

The problem is it is very difficult to prove. And most people don't go through the effort of trying to expose the frauds who are claiming to be lawyers.

So here is a challenge for anyone reading this. If you know of a fake lawyer / debt collector, please leave their name and supposed location in the comments below. This way when people google that fake lawyer / debt collector's name and city, this blog post will come up in the google search results and people will be able to instantly recognize that the person in question is just running a scam.