Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller is leading a multi-state investigation of banks and other businesses — like debt collectors — that go after delinquent credit card debt. Geoff Greenwood is a spokesman for the attorney general..
“In some cases, they’re getting the wrong person,” Greenwood says. “In other cases, they’re collecting the wrong debt amount or their paperwork is just not sufficient for collecting that debt through the courts.”
Greenwood says investigators may uncover instances of automatic signing of documents similar to what mortgage companies were accused of after a surge of home foreclosures.
“There may be situations where banks or credit card companies put someone in front of a stack of documents and had them sign the documents, and asserting they are true and accurate,” Greenwood says, “and perhaps that didn’t really occur where they reviewed these documents.”
Iowa’s attorney general was involved in the mulit-state investigation of mortgage lenders that resulted in a 25-billion dollar national settlement for customers who were wrongly foreclosed upon. Several federal agencies are involved in this new investigation of the credit card industry and Greenwood says it includes reviewing the cases of some Iowa consumers who were behind on credit card payments.