Daily Digest – November 12. CNN Tackles ‘Zombie’ Debt; Hiring Debt Collectors To Go After Overpaid Teachers

Some quick links to start your Thursday. More on the anti-CFPB ad campaign … Dunkin’ Donuts gets in on the Starbucks holiday CupGate … Wal-Mart announces its Black Friday strategy … FanDuel and DraftKings are fighting back against New York State’s ruling … Man on jetpack flies around Statue of Liberty … The best and worst airlines for holiday travel … A 60,000-square foot mansion in Florida is on the market for $159 million … Meanwhile, a garage in Silicon Valley is on sale for $2 million … A vending machine that dispenses cars … A hacker has leaked the records of 70 million phone calls placed from prisons … Meanwhile, an 11-year-old is selling more secure passwords … A woman who started destroying hard drives for $20 each just sold her company for $2 million … An example of why getting the perfect domain name matters.

NEWS 

• Until yesterday, one court in California was requiring defendants who had missed payments on fines and court costs to repay all their debts in full prior to being eligible to have their drivers licenses reinstated. For many low-income workers, that was an impossible payment to make. Other courts in the state did not have this requirement? Why the discrepancy? Because the amnesty program that these cases fall under did not define what it meant for consumers to be in “good standing.” The lesson? Make sure that you know how your clients want you to handle accounts before you start collecting on them.

• This is from New Zealand, so you know it has to be interesting for me to link to it. Teachers in New Zealand were accidentally overpaid, about $1,000, on average. To get the money back from those who have not repaid it, the country is now going to hire debt collectors to go after the teachers. That’s going work out well, don’t you think?

• There really isn’t anything new in this article, but it’s the mainstream media and they were able to get an assistant director at the FTC to talk, so it’s worth linking to, anyway. But CNN is saying that the number of “zombie” collection scams are on the rise, and the FTC is trying to warn consumers about what to watch out for, like if the collector is using high-pressure sales tactics right off the bat in a conversation.

• Even though data breaches appear to be as prevalent as ever, consumers are less worried about identity theft as the holiday shopping season approaches, according to a survey conducted by TransUnion. Only 35% of consumers plan to change their shopping behavior because of data breaches and only 52% are worried about identity theft, compared with 64% last year.

How to win an argument

An interview with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon

If you have a tip or item you would like to share, or are interested in sponsoring the Daily Digest, please contact me at [email protected].