Pretexting And Judgment Enforcement
Bank garnishments and levies are one of the best methods of enforcing a judgment
. Usually, the most difficult aspect of a bank levy, is finding out where a judgment debtor banks. Before 1999, one could lie to their debtor to try and fool them into disclosing the location of their bank. The parts of discussions with debtors which include lying, is named pretexting. Using a pretext to get banking information, was declared illegal in 1999. My articles are my opinions and are not, legal advice. I'm a judgment referral expert, and not an attorney. When you ever need a strategy to use or legal advice, please contact a lawyer.
In 1999, the US Congress and President Clinton passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley (GLB) Act. That statute made it illegal to tell any deception, lie, or non-truth with the intention of obtaining the personal bank information of a bank customer. It's now illegal to make fraudulent statements, or to impersonate someone, for the purpose of getting information like bank account numbers or account balances.
It's also illegal to purposely hire, or arrange for other persons to use pretext methods. There are legal (and time consuming and often costly) methods to discover a debtor's banking info. A popular legal method is with judgment debtor exams and 3rd-party document requests.
Pretexting received a lot of attention in the media in 2006, when Hewlett-Packard's (HP) Chairwoman Ms. Patricia Dunn got frustrated by leaks to the media from HP's board of directors. It is claimed that Ms. Dunn secretly got the telephone records of HP's board members, to find patterns of their calling and contacts. While eavesdropping was not involved, the unauthorized record access created a public relations hassle for HP.
Pretexting is defined as "the use of false pretenses, including false statements and impersonation, to obtain consumers' personal or financial information". Because no banking information was obtained, is what happened at HP a crime? This is a cloudy area, because if the laws are written as hammers, much of the world seems as if it was a nail.
In 2008, the FTC shut down and sued two companies (Eye in the Sky Investigations - ESI, and Action Research Group- ARG) which sold consumer's phone and other personal information, as they lied about who they were, to get info using false pretenses, which was pretexting.
Mostly in the past, some judgment enforcers used to send gift card offers, to attempt to obtain private judgment debtor info. Now, that could be considered to be a pretext, and is not worth the risks. Pretexting is still illegal, even when you have "permissible purpose".
When judgment enforcers hire research companies to locate the judgment debtor's bank accounts, they should be sure that the company requires permissible purpose from them (and that the judgment recovery specialist is enforcing judgments they own), and that the company assures the enforcer that they follow GLB laws and do not use pretexting.
The lesson is to be really careful if you pretext, and never use pretexting to locate banking information. In general, and particularly if you are part of, or are related to a business, avoid using any form of pretexting.
A bank garnishment or levy is an excellent tool for judgment recovery. Make sure that when you do the post-judgment asset discovery to find out where to have a bank garnishment served, you bypass any pretext. For more info on this topic, check out: http://banking.senate.gov/conf/confrpt.htm
by: Mark Shapiro
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