Attorney General Cuomo Announces Arrest of LI Business Owner For Denying...

[Posteritatis]

Source: Office of the Attorney General of New York

(Sorry about the cut headline; it's too long. Full is below.)

ATTORNEY GENERAL CUOMO ANNOUNCES ARREST OF LONG ISLAND BUSINESS OWNER FOR DENYING THOUSANDS OF NEW YORKERS THEIR DAY IN COURT

American Legal Process Provided “Sewer Service” to Thousands of New Yorkers Owing Debt According to Criminal Complaint and Civil Suit; Failed to Properly Notify the Individuals That They Faced Lawsuits

LONG ISLAND, NY (April 14, 2009) - Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced criminal charges against Long Island-based American Legal Process (“ALP”) and its CEO and President William Singler for a fraudulent business scheme in which the company allegedly failed to provide proper legal notification to thousands of New Yorkers facing debt-related lawsuits, causing them unknowingly to default and have costly judgments entered against them without the chance to respond or defend themselves.

According to the court papers filed today, ALP, as a legal process server, was hired by high-volume debt collection law firms in New York to serve legal papers, usually a summons and complaint, notifying individuals that they are being sued and must answer the complaint. ALP, however, allegedly engaged in “sewer service,” where process servers take advantage of individuals facing lawsuits by failing to properly alert them and denying them the chance to respond. As a result, thousands of judgments were allegedly obtained against unsuspecting New Yorkers, many of whom first learned they were being sued when they found their bank accounts frozen or their wages garnished. ALP allegedly covered up the fraud by falsifying sworn affidavits of service in courts across New York. The Attorney General’s Office also filed a parallel civil suit against ALP and Singler seeking a court order prohibiting them from engaging in improper service of process, monetary damages and substantial penalties.

In addition, Cuomo announced his intent to sue one of ALP’s largest customers, the law firm of Forster & Garbus, for violations of New York State’s consumer protection laws. According to Cuomo, Forster & Garbus used ALP to serve over 28,000 summons and complaints across the state, but failed to supervise the company and relied on legal papers from ALP that it knew or should have known were false.

Read more: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/media_center/2009/apr/apr14a_09.html

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Unambiguously awesome (aside from the fact that this shit was going on in the first place). Apparently stuff like this is overwhelmingly common in the state and they've been tracking down the responsible parties for some time. Glad to see the AG finally had enough to pounce.

[47of74]

1. These people should be in prison for the next one million years.

[Posteritatis]

3. I'm feeling charitable. A mere 600,000 would satisfy me. (nt)

[24601]

11. better yet, nullify the debt in its entirety and find for counter-suits

nothing will deter collection agencies like automatically losing their investment in buying distressed debt.

[pleah]

2. K&R

[indimuse]

4. KNR!

just when you think...

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Note to Cuomo....avoid prostitutes, small planes, and sweep your office for bugs.

And keep on keeping on.
Maybe you can hire Spitzer????

[iandhr]

6. I worked for one of Cuomo's opponents in the Democratic Primary.

I take back everything bad I said about him

[xchrom]

7. recommend

[DesertDiamond]

8. This isn't the first time large numbers of fake documents have been used to rip off the public...

Back in 1999, every tenant in the West L.A. apartment building I lived in was suddenly served with an eviction notice for not paying the higher rent we had supposedly been told about, but had not. All of the tenants either moved out or just resolved it by paying the higher rent. All except for me; I challenged it in court. The building owners brought in a falsified notice of a raise in rent which they claimed had been served on me. Neither I nor any other tenant had been served with any such document. In addition, a woman I had never seen before gave me a very friendly hello when I arrived in the courtroom, as if she knew me. This woman was then presented to the court as my manager -- when in fact the manager was someone else -- and proceeded to swear under oath that she had personally served the notice on me. It was clear to me she had been hired to show up and commit perjury so that they could win their case. The judge didn't believe me.

Three months later, in February of 2000, I saw an article in the papers saying that what my building owners had done to me was in fact being perpetrated by many other building owners. They too were issuing eviction notices for failure to pay the higher rents that they had never notified the tenants about. And they were showing up in court with falsified documents.

This taught me a lot about how ineffectual our legal system is; attorneys can just blatantly lie, and there are no safeguards in place to prevent them from doing so, unless perhaps one is well of enough to hire a private investigator to dig up the truth. Which brings us back to what I have said on many occasions. I'm so glad this American Legal Process scam was busted, but it's a rare victory for the people. Most of the time, justice is only for those who can afford it.

[Posteritatis]

9. I get the impression that the ability to hunt stuff like this down is relatively new

(Also, ugh, what a horrible situation you just described there. Anything ever come of it?)

A friend of mine (who's a lawyer in NY and might have been involved in taking these guys down, but I don't know for sure - I'll ask) said that it's pretty difficult to get a mass of case information together to do some data sifting. You can get the info of any particular case that's publicly available on request, but asking for, say, "all debt cases that involved ALP somehow in the last five years" is another matter. Getting enough data together to run searches on it is an administrative (and labor-intensive) nightmare.

Or anyway, it was until relatively recently, when people got enough data together to start checking large numbers of cases for discrepancies. If you see that the number of default judgements in debt cases is usually X percent, but is five times that for any where ALP or whoever served the papers, then you've got something to start zeroing in on. People suspected that sewer service is somewhere between common and the actual default situation in New York, but this would be the first hard evidence.

I suspect that we might be seeing a lot more of this in the next while, if people are able to see some patterns and are able to point at a really, really egregious instance of abuse. Here's hoping, anyway; this one's too big not to follow up on.

[truedelphi]

10. What a story! Were you able to point out that this womanm was a liar?

A lot of people just go into shock when a lie is presented as Truth. They become so discomboobulated that they don't respond.

I would think you would be able to appeal a case like this, if you indeed lost.