Question:
Dear Steve,
Given the new lawsuits filed against Jeremy Marcus and his companies what do you suggest I do to repair my tarnished credit due to their scam? I was a customer from May 2015 until January 2017 when I realized it was a scam.
I paid off all original creditors or the debt clearing agencies in the past 5months. One of the 6 accounts is on a stipulation agreement with a monthly payment. I’m wondering if I could submit this lawsuit to the original creditors and prove it wasn’t my fault the accounts went unpaid. I was not even 30 days late with a payment when I signed on with Helping America Group but my spouse lost their job and I knew things would get difficult.
I thought I was fixing the problem before it started. Obviously that was not the case. We are obviously in a much better financial place now. Just need to get my tarnished credit fixed and back where it was. Thank you again!
Julia
Answer:
Dear Julia,
It would be very hard/impossible to tie the actions of the scammers and the elections you made to requiring your creditors to misrepresent the reporting of your accounts.
A credit report contains accounts creditors volunteer to report to the bureaus and must contain a true and factual statement regarding account performance.
I don’t think there is any dispute your accounts were actually late.
It’s also not the fault of the creditors that you decided to hire Helping America Group and become a victim of their scam.
Hiring any debt relief company does not alter or change the agreements in place between a consumer and their creditors. That being said, the best settlements are obtained after the account falls delinquent. So letting the account fall delinquent was always a feature of the Helping America Group, and 321 Loans program so they could then attempt to settle your debts.
The problem with the Helping America Group approach is it was doomed to failure. In a 2015 Helping America Group client agreement, the company required all customers to agree, “Company does not offer credit correction or credit repair services. Company is not a credit counseling service as defined above. Company does not collect money from Client to pay a creditor or collector. Company is not a service provider.”
You can now see why I was publicly so critical of the company from the earliest days.
The purported assumption of consumer debts was always a work of fiction. You can’t assign your obligations away to another entity unless your creditor agreed to it. Which they were never going to do.
So in the end, I’m sorry to say I’m afraid you are unfortunately just another of the thousands of consumers who fell for the sales pitch of a company the State of Florida and Federal Trade Commission has called a scam.
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