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Rent-A-Center to pay $8.75-million fine for threatening to have some customers arrested when they got behind on payments and harassing others
By adamg on Tue, 11/28/2023 - 2:10pm
The state Attorney General's office reported today that Rent-A-Center illegally filed 951 criminal complaints over a three-year period against consumers who fell behind on their payments for the TVs, furniture and refrigerators they were renting - and sent employees to try to get into consumers homes, to the point of trying their doorknobs if nobody answered their pounding on doors and windows.
In an "assurance of discontinuance" filed in Suffolk Superior Court, the state also alleged that the Plano, TX-based company violated other state laws related to the frequency of calls companies are allowed to make to consumers both at home and at their workplaces.
The company, which has 44 stores in Massachusets, signed off on the filing without admitting it did anything wrong, but in addition to agreeing to pay the state $8.75 million within 90 days, it agreed to stop doing the things it wouldn't admit it had been doing, such as threatening to have consumers arrested if they didn't pay up right away.
According to the filing, Rent-A-Center sought hundreds of criminal complaints in court under a state law related to larceny of leased property that has maximum penalties of a year in jail and a fine of up to $100,000, without any proof that the consumers in question were actually attempting to abscond with the stuff
The state further charged the company harassed consumers who had fallen behind their payments:
The Attorney General alleges that in some instances, RAC employees pounded on doors and windows, turned doorknobs to see if exterior doors were unlocked, and demanded to be let in.
Also:
RAC employees initiated more than two Debt collection calls to individual Consumers in a seven-day period.
RAC routinely made more than one call to a Consumer's workplace in a seven-day period and more than two calls in a 30-day period.
RAC failed to send Consumers the required notice of their right to request that creditors not contact them at work.
RAC employees contacted Consumers at work even in instances when Consumers demanded that RAC stop calling them at work.
Complete filing (1.3M PDF).
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Comments
Ain't that
What the repo man supposed to do?
Literal Rent Seeking
End stage capitalism antics. Corporate America hates democracy and the rule of law.
And goverment is asleep at wheel
Why did it take 950+ complaints to get state action against this company?
And Rent-A-Center is well known for their shady tactics and ability to prey on their customers. This isn't an outlier, it's their business model. They are a collection agency with a showroom.
whose complaints?
You seem to have misunderstood. It was RAC that filed those complaints *against its customers* between 2016 and 2018.
We don't know when the AG's office started its investigation or what prompted it to investigate.
You're right!
I read it wrong.
They've been on North St. in BVT for decades
My mom taught me was "They set up shop in poor neighborhoods, and you pay far more than you would to own whatever you're renting outright."
End financial illiteracy.
Perhaps not quite that simple
With no disrespect to your mother, there are certain kinds of savings that are only available to people who have all the money up front. I'm sure your mother would also say "then they should save until they can buy it", but perhaps your mother also never had a credit card. In any event, affluent people can save money in all kinds of ways that poor people can't. They can buy the 40-pack of toilet paper, they own a car and can drive to the store where they can buy a three months' supply of whatever they need, and they can do all of those things because they have the money now. And that's the thing about poverty, you have recurring costs like housing and food that can't be deferred for however long it takes to save up the money. Ending financial illiteracy is a great goal, but only if it's accompanied by other tools and resources that will allow poor people to benefit from that knowledge.
Boots Theory agrees with you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
this case used to be taught
in most first year law school contracts courses. I don't know about now
Jones v Star Credit Corp.
https://casetext.com/case/jones-v-star-credit-corp
You see it's very similar to the kind of thing Rent a Center and Aaron's does.
The case describes the doctrine of unconscionability, in which a court will not uphold a contract which is too unbalanced or manifestly unfair.
Over the last 30 years or so, courts have stopped applying this doctrine, which is why everything from buying a refrigerator with proprietary software through your telecom contract, your social media privacy terms and conditions, to your credit card terms are a scam.
Judges in a District or Superior Court will send someone to jail a lot quicker on less evidence than they will rule against a corporation in a consumer protection matter.
And the thing is, the mainstream media has no interest in covering these issues, because the victims are poor and the issues pedestrian to the elite social class journalists are from now.
Hell
I remember Judge Mathis using the term "unconsciable contract" once.
These days, what does it even
These days, what does it even mean to be called at work? How many people work at a place with a phone that can be used to contact individual employees?
Some examples
People who work in hospitals.
People who work retail.
People who work in factories.
People who work in repair shops.
People who work in restaurants.
People who work at power generation and water and sewer facilities.
People who work in hotels.
... and more.
Not everyone has an office job that can be done from wherever.
TBF
He said "individual employees."
I would hardly expect for an assembly line worker in a factory to halt the production to field a personal phone call on whatever general telephone exists inside the facility.
How it works
These scumbags call the main number for whatever company their target works for so that their boss asks why someone is calling the sales line asking for them personally. That's an embarrassing conversation for most people.
This is true even for people who WFH in front of a computer.
Today I Learned
Rent-A-Center is still a thing. Thought they folded years ago.
Predatory lenders
Rent-A-Center gouges customers by renting to them, making their money back on the TVs and myriad other goods they offer. They know their customers can't afford these things and are then manhandling them when they can't make their payments, for the item they already paid more for in rental payments than the thing would cost if they bought it outright.
Thugs and goons, preying on the poor.
I paid 4 times the price of a
I paid 4 times the price of a 50 inch Sony TV, 6 speaker Sony Stereo and entertainment center to hold it all back in the 90s - 20 oughts: by renting to buy through them. Worse deal even than buying PALM inc. stock back then.
Magoo sez
Magoo would like to rent …. A …. Center. And throw a big funsie par-tah!!!!!! Magoo.
Keepin' the poor, poor
in the ruse of "keeping up with the jones". Gosh for bid people don't have nice furniture or a big screen tv.. cuz they might be seen as *gasp* poor.
Here comes Rent-A-Center.. filling in that gap. For 300 easy 20/week payments this really crappy Wal-Mart special TV that will croak in a year can be yours?
Our society is broken when people feel they have to enter into predatory schemes like Rent-A-Center in order to "keep up with the jones" just so they can have nice things.
It's not even Rent-a-center anymore doing this.. major retailers are doing this now too. See all the signs for "buy now, pay over time" or "Klarna" at the checkouts of your favorite retailers.. so you can make payments on 150 dollar Nike sneakers that you can't afford... just because Society says you need these things to be 'pretty' or 'popular' or 'not poor'.
Watch this space.. these "buy now, pay over time" places will be next. Give it a few years for folks to default on these payment schemes and let them try to do collections on this. We'll be back here again.
The whole business plan of these places is to keep people in debt and poor.
I guess I was raised wrong.. I was told as a child that if you couldn't afford something, you went without. You wanted something expensive that you couldn't afford? You saved for it. I also was raised with the notion "if its too good to be true, it's probably not". This applies to entered in an agreements with places like Klarna or Rent-A-Center.
The next 10-15 years are going to be a lot of fun when this stuff all comes home to roost.
Me too
I've never once purchased something for which I didn't have (or could make) liquid assets on hand to pay for it.
I took out a loan for my current car when I bought it in 2016, but I didn't have to. The 3 percent and change interest rate (with no penalty for paying it off early) was easily outpaced by my stock gains between 2016, and when I decided to pay it off two years early in 2021.
There's another bubble coming. I wish I was Michael Burry.
Reminds me of Holiday Spas Health Clubs in the 1980a
I worked in their collections department. A collections department for a health club? A department that had nearly 50 people?
Holiday Health Spas sales people were told to sell, sell, sell! If it walks in on a 2 legs don't let it walk out without signing a contract. Yes, I purposely use the word it.
Most folks signed up not fully understanding the contract. But that was the point. The contract was so convoluted that when you signed, you signed away lots of money and if you claimed you didn't understand the response was pay or we will chase you to the ends of the Earth.
That is where I learned about skip tracing. After calling the defaulting customer a few times and getting no response the next step was to call their neigbhor. Pretend to be someone who needs to convey important information (e.g, a dead distant relative). This used a phone book sorted by addressed. Knowing the customer's address I could look up their neighbors. The goal was to impose a subtle intimidation.
Calling people at work was fair game.
To top thing off if an employee was 1 minute late they were docked for 15 minutes. Which actually meant working another 15 minutes unpaid.
The sick thing is that there was not actually anything lost on the part of Holiday Spas. No service was rendered; no product was ever delivered. This was the scam of scams. Get people to sign up for using a health club for a year. Whether they use it or not is irrelevant. A contract is a contract!!!
The people who ran this corporation were vicious. If Donald Trump knew any of the economic-fascists running this business he must have been proud of their tactics.
Bally's
Wasn't Bally's what became of Holiday Health Spas?
And if it was.. this went on until the early 2000s. I had a membership at the Ballys in Porter Square and when I moved to Chelsea, I tried to get out of the membership because the location closests to me now was in Saugus. Too far for someone who didn't have car. Ballys didnt care.. I had a contract.
When I changed banks, they no longer could charge my debit card anymore, so it went to collections.
They called me at work
They called me at home
They called friends
They even went as far as calling my step mother's MOTHER. (yes really, that was fun explaining to a 78 old woman why they were calling for her step grandson who was in his thirties)
But they kept calling. Finally one day, I went off on the person on the telephone and reminded them of MA state law (as stated above in article). And told them if they wanted their money, they would have to sue me for it. Amazing how these people stopped calling when legal action was necessary. (b/c legal action = more $ than the contact was worth)
I also think shortly after they closed all of their MA locations, which literally gave them no room to stand on to try to uphold the contract. Hard to uphold a contract a gym that has no locations in your state.
Showing any knowledge of debt collections law
is often enough to get them to give up on you.
(Because most debt collection agencies push their employees to break the law many times per day, so it's not worth the risk that someone will sue them under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.)
The correct answer, in any case, is to tell them to switch to communicating in writing for all future interactions. Paper trails can be good for you and bad for debt collectors, and it's apparently just harder for them to manage the communications anyhow, so sometimes they'll give up.
None of this fixes the credit report, of course, but it can stop the harassment.
Weirdly enough
Weirdly enough this never showed up on my credit report. Which was part of the reason why I was like "sue me if you want the $".
Gyms
What obnoxious cults. I never set foot in one, and I still got laid enough in my 20's and 30's.
The irony of this is that
The irony of this is that much better used furniture can be had for the equivalent of a couple of months worth of rent at places like RAC.
I can't even sell a nice all-wood dresser for $40 on Craigslist these days.
Another amazing place is Habitat Restore in Dedham (or is it West Roxbury?). Lots of great furniture and not much particle board at 10 to 25% of the new price. Even if you have to rent a vehicle or buy your friend with a truck or SUV a nice dinner in exchange for services, you still come way ahead.
Estatessales.net has some amazing find as well + it feels like a small weekend adventure and allows one to be nozy by looking into rich people's house.
90's commercial
Disappointing that our beloved Norm Peterson shilled for this (expletive).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuPpNTUo-9E