There’s scum, there’s dirty rotten scum, and there's these guys.
A Chevy Chase company that reaped millions of dollars from deals with poor, disabled victims of lead-paint poisoning in Baltimore has been accused of committing fraud and deceiving court officials, according to a lawsuit filed this week by the Maryland attorney general’s office.
You’ve probably seen the ads offering to buy structured settlements for a one-time up-front payment. Like taking the cash option on the lottery, selling a settlement can provide a larger payment to meet immediate needs, but it does so at a cost. A big cost. The reason those ads are so prevalent is that companies that buy out settlements generally pay out less than a quarter of the full value of the settlement.
That’s bad enough when it’s a company coming after a worker desperate to make ends meet after being disabled by an on-the-job accident. But it’s even worse when the target is people who got settlements expressly because they were victims of a problem that left them unable to work through the details of what they’re being offered.
The civil suit alleges that Access Funding violated state law when it aggressively pursued scores of mentally impaired lead-poisoning victims, persuaded them to sell the settlements they received in personal injury lawsuits for a fraction of their worth and then withheld vital information from the courts that approved the deals.
They “aggressively pursued” mentally impaired victims and got them to sign over settlements for a song, then hid both the details of the transactions and their own business relationships from the courts.
Excuse me, Keith, are you using that Worst Person in the World Award? I think I found a winner.
The whole purpose of setting up structured settlements in these cases was to protect people who needed to have a source of income over a long period. In this case, over a lifetime. Access Funding took that away. Now the payments for the settlements end up in their pockets, and poverty is added to the misery of people who have already suffered far too much.
To protect these people from striking bad deals, Maryland, like almost every state in the country, passed legislation establishing a series of protective measures. First, a seller must seek the counsel of an independent professional adviser. The proposed deal then must go before a county judge, who decides whether that agreement reflects the seller’s best interests.
How do you make sure that the people who are making the deal keep the best interest of the victim in mind? To start with, they need to be independent of the company offering to buy the settlement. In this case, that wasn’t true. Access Funding had their own inside man in the system, making deals favorable to the company while pretending to protect the victims.
Forget scum. Scum is better than that.