If you’re behind on your credit card payments, could the card company take what you owe directly out of your bank account?

It can happen, and debt collectors are becoming increasingly aggressive in Houston, going after old debts and getting court orders to do it.

Anita Peleli said she needs all the strength she can get.

Why? Because she’s fighting off bill collectors who’re after her meager monthly income from Social Security: $574.39.

She used to be clerk at a hotel but got sick with lung and thyroid problems. Now she can’t payoff several thousand dollars in credit card debt.

“There’s no way I can pay it,” she said.

But that didn’t stop attorneys for one of her creditors.

They went to court, got a judgment and took every last dime out of her checking account,  which at the time held all of $57.

“I thought I was going to have a heart attack, seriously,” Peleli said.

What kind of attorneys would go after people like Peleli? Two Houston lawyers who were running a couple hundred debt collection cases a month through the county courts.

“I did hundreds of cases,” Nikkisha Phipps said.

Phipps and Maisha Stroud worked for a law firm out of Little Rock, Ark., that specializes in debt collection.

Another one of that firm’s lawyers last month in this Harris County Justice of the Peace court. The judge said the number of debt cases is getting overwhelming and in most every one, the debt collection lawyers count on the debtor never showing up.

“So it was my word against no one’s words,” Phipps said. “So I’d win the judgment.”

“The more judgments you get, the [more] bonuses you get,” Stroud said.

But after handling hundreds of the cases, these two young attorneys began to notice a very troubling pattern.

“You started to figure out names were wrong, addresses were wrong, it was the wrong person completely,” Phipps said.

And even when they had the right person they were sometimes like Peleli: disabled or old or broke.

“At that point I realized I couldn’t do it anymore,” Phipps said.

The two have now switched sides: They’re defending people against debt collectors.

“Well, to the public we’re bad guys,” Terry Wunsch said. He’s a debt collector running this agency in West Houston.

He said he sues people only as a last resort but at times, without knowing their health or financial problems like one man recently.

“Didn’t respond to anything we’d sent to him or telephone calls,” he said.
“Showed up in court, and the guy’s on kidney dialysis.”

He said he wouldn’t have taken the guy to court if he knew about the dialysis.

But what if the debtor is like Peleli whose money is all from Social Security?

It’s illegal to take someone’s government assistance to pay a credit card debt.  

So how’d it happen to her?

Peleli said she never was served with any papers, and so she never told the court that her money is from Social Security.

When she did make it known, she did get her money back.

But still: “I’m not free,” she said.

She worries the debt collectors will keep calling, keep trying to get her to pay an old debt that she cannot afford.