If you’ve been sued out of nowhere by a company called Midland Credit Management, you’re not alone. This company is one of a group of companies that are some of the biggest “debt buyers” in the United States. The “debt buyer” business model works like this: companies will buy up large numbers of debts, sometimes so old that they can’t even legally collect on them anymore. Then they start filing lawsuit after lawsuit, hoping that you don’t bother to show up. And if you don’t, they win by default, and they can do things like garnishing your wages or trying to seize your property.
The problem is that often these kinds of lawsuits don’t play by the rules. Studies have estimated that up to 98% of the people that get sued in them don’t show up. So why bother checking anything if you’ll win most of your lawsuits automatically?
In fact, the group of companies behind Midland—Encore Capital Group, Inc., Midland Funding, LLC; Midland Credit Management, Inc.; and Asset Acceptance Capital Corp.—were subject to a court order from 2015 based on filing lawsuits with inadequate documentation and violating various laws. They were sued again in 2020 by a government agency, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for violating the law again “by suing consumers without possessing required documentation” and “by suing consumers to collect debts even though the statutes of limitations had run on those debts.” The government alleged a variety of other violations in their debt collection efforts in the 2020 lawsuit.
If you’ve been sued by Midland Credit Management (MCM) or they’re trying to collect a debt against you, Click Here to Submit Your Claim. We’re happy to evaluate your case for free to see if there have been any legal violations.
DON’T IGNORE IT. That’s the worst thing you can do. A lot of the people who get sued by them think it’s just some kind of mistake. You probably have never even heard of the company. But that’s usually because they bought your debt from someone else. You could have owed money on a car loan, for example, and the financing company could have sold it over and over again—until it ended up owned by Midland Credit.
Often there are legal violations in these kinds of lawsuits because when a debt gets sold over and over again, it isn’t properly documented. The statute of limitations may have run out. They may have broken the law in the ways they tried to collect from you. You may not even owe the debt in the first place—we’ve seen people sued by some debt collectors just because they had the same name as someone in a different state.
Whether it’s us or someone else, you will want to talk to a lawyer. And you absolutely don’t want to wait to call. When a lawsuit gets filed, there’s strict deadlines, and the sooner you start talking to attorneys the better.
We use a law called the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to try to shut down companies like Midland Credit Management, Inc. when they violate the law. That law lets consumers win $1,000 and their actual damages and emotional distress damages if the debt collector violated various rules. That can include suing outside the statute of limitations, suing far away from where you live, or harassing you about the debt. It can also include suing on a debt you don’t actually owe or threatening to sue when they don’t have any legal right to do it.
Just because Midland Credit sued you doesn’t mean there’s a violation, but given their history and the past allegations against them, it’s always worth doing a review. And we don’t charge to do case evaluations.
If a debt collector is suing you or harassing you, Click Here to Submit Your Claim. We’ll review your case and we don’t charge for the evaluation.