“Too Big To Fail” Banks Get Bailout, Gave Customers The Shaft

Chalk One Up for the Working Man

By Donald V. Watkins
©Copyrighted and Published (via Facebook) on December 18, 2016
Used with permission

On Thursday, I tried a case for a close friend on mine in the Jefferson County, Alabama District Court in Bessemer, Alabama. My friend is a hard working Bessemer resident and family man whose world was turned upside down when Citibank sold his credit card account to San Diego-based junk debt buyer, Midland Funding, LLC. He is one of millions of bank credit card customers each year whose accounts are bundled in loan pools and then sold to junk debt buyers without the customer’s knowledge.

Midland Funding is one of several mega junk debt buyers in America. This group of financial sharks buys unsecured bank debt for pennies on a dollar and then strong arms debtors who miss one or more of their monthly payments. Midland is part of a multi-billion industry of shady financial predators.

In my friend’s case, Citibank sold his account to Midland Funding. The balance on the account was $6,800. My friend paid his credit card monthly on a regular basis, but had an unexpected hiccup in his monthly cash flow a couple of years after he opened the account. As a result he failed to make a couple of his payments on time. When this occurred Citibank sold my friend’s account to Midland, and Midland eventually sued my friend. This is how my friend became my client.

Remember, Citibank had a similar hiccup during the Great Recession of 2008. The bank requested and received a total of $181.6 billion in federal bailout assistance to keep from collapsing. In fact, Citibank led the banking industry’s “welfare queens” by receiving more financial bailout assistance than any big bank in the U.S.

Citibank’s “Thank You” to the taxpayers like my client, whose tax dollars made the financial bailout possible for these big banks, was the low-down act of selling his credit card account to a shark like Midland Funding. The big banks were quick to take taxpayer-sponsored financial assistance, but slow to give taxpayers similar financial assistance in return.

[Editor’s Note: Alamerica Bank, which is

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