2010 Credit Suit - Credit, FICO Scoring and Collection News

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Man sets himself on fire over Rent-A-Center collection efforts

Man Sets Himself on Fire Over Debt Collection Actions

July 31, 2008

A debtor in New Jersey found a new way to register his displeasure with the collection tactics of a local Rent-A-Center.

by insideARM staff
July 31, 2008

A New Jersey man was in critical condition at a Livingston hospital after he set himself ablaze at a Rent-A-Center store in protest of the volume of late payment notices and collection calls he’d received from the chain, according to local media reports.

Emilio Saladriagas, a 62 year-old man from Newark, went to the Rent-A-Center in Bloomington Tuesday to speak to a manager about the collection letters and calls he had been receiving regarding missed payments on furniture rentals. When he was told a manager was not available, he doused himself with lighter fluid and lit the fluid with a cigarette lighter, self-immolating in front of customers and employees of the store.

As of Tuesday evening, Saladriagas was in critical condition. Police said that he will not be charged with a crime because store surveillance appeared to show he intended to hurt no one but himself.

“We don’t know if he had mental health issues or what sparked it,” Bloomfield Police Capt. Chris Goul told The Star-Ledger. “Employees said he’d always been a nice man.”

Rent-A-Center (Nasdaq: RCII) has been accused in the past of unfair business practices concerning its credit granting and debt collection tactics. In 2006, the state of California reached a $7.75 million settlement with the company for what regulators said was a failure to “disclose the true cost of its rent-to-own program.”

There are numerous articles about Emilio Saladriagas:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS245US245&q=Emilio+Saladriagas

I’ll try to update on his condition and whether a lawyer will sue Rent-A-Center on his behalf.

How will he live if he survives?

My comments are in the post about the woman who killed herself on foreclosure day:
http://creditsuit.org/credit.php/blog/reader_mail_hopeless_and_overwhelmed_after_reading_my_sites/

For every person in the news over financial problems, there are MANY deaths due to drug or alcohol abuse and stress related accidents and illnesses. They don’t cause headlines, they just can’t take the creditors’ abuse anymore and they perish quietly and nobody gives a damn.

The legislators do NOTHING to protect consumers and as their actions in recent months document, they throw literally billions of dollars at the banks who can’t pay their bills while paying their executives many millions and consumers are free to become homeless and/or kill themselves. Creditors HARASS debtors until they pay - or die. And as I’ve posted in the past, even death often does not stop the harassment and the surviving relatives are tortured.

ONLY collectors are regulated by the FDCPA, federal law allows creditors to call you multiple times per day.

If you’re close to judgment-proof:

STOP paying your credit cards!

Use the first payment you do NOT make to the creditors to pay for a new UNLISTED telephone number and do NOT call toll-free numbers from the new number as even unlisted numbers will be revealed.

Don’t wait until you can’t make the payments, make a rational business decision and know that you’re doing the RIGHT thing by not paying these thugs.

UPDATE: The article was at the COLLECTION site InsideARM.com and I just noticed a change from:

“A debtor in New Jersey found a new way to register his displeasure with the collection tactics of a local Rent-A-Center.”

To:

“A debtor in New Jersey, displeased with the collection tactics of a local Rent-A-Center, set himself on fire in the store after asking to speak to a manager.”

Even the changed version shows the collectors’ utter contempt for human life. They don’t recognize the difference between an angry letter and an extremely painful suicide attempt?

You don’t kill yourself because you’re “displeased”.

You kill yourself when you’re so frustrated, stressed and desperate that you’d rather be dead.