"They make you feel like a criminal. They try scare tactics, harassment and everything. And you take a look and ask, 'Seriously, is the attorney general of Florida after me for a $14 bounced check?' "
- Michael O'Neil, who wrote two bad checks while living in Florida.
Amazing story. Basically, these District Attorney offices are renting out their name to deceptive bill collectors for bounced checks under $100. Think about it: You're so tight for money that you bounce a check under $100, you still have to pay all the bank fees AND you get slammed for $200+ in charges from this rent-a-cop collection agency? Nice, huh.
I always question the legal premise of anything like this I get in the mail, and you should, too:
DETROIT, Michigan (CNN) -- Michelle O'Neil and her husband Michael are young, scrambling to stay afloat financially and, by their own admission, not the best money managers.
Both acknowledge they wrote two bad checks, totaling about $200, as they were moving from Florida to Michigan in late 2007. The bad checks, they say, were mistakes. But nearly a year after they settled in a Detroit suburb, letters and phone calls followed from Florida.
"They told me they were part of the attorney general's office," Michelle O'Neil told CNN. "And that was scary in the sense that I've never had any legal problems. I'm a teacher."
But the calls weren't coming from a state agency. They were coming from a company hired by a Florida county prosecutor's office to collect on bounced checks.
The firm -- American Corrective Counseling Services, or ACCS -- splits the money it collects with the prosecutor's office. But it also makes money from financial management courses that people who wrote the checks are required by law to attend at their own expense. And the company's contract with the prosecutor's office states those classes are its "principal business activity."
The $14 check Michael O'Neil wrote to a Florida drugstore ended up costing him $285, including the $160 class fee.
O'Neil said he and his wife tried to make good on the checks with the merchants involved and pay any fees required. But he said the companies told him it was too late -- they had turned the matter over to ACCS.
The couple had been in Michigan for 10 months before they got their first notice from the company, which warned that "the State Attorney will not discharge the report(s) of criminal activity against you until all program requirements, including attending class, have been met."
"They make you feel like a criminal," Michael O'Neil told CNN. "They try scare tactics, harassment and everything. And you take a look and ask, 'Seriously, is the attorney general of Florida after me for a $14 bounced check?' "
The short answer is yes. Prosecutors are outsourcing some of their bad-check collections to companies like ACCS.
But Jennifer Osborn, a California student who bounced a $92 check to her college bookstore, said the company's money-management class was useless to her.
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