“As it stands, any idiot can get into [the debt buying industry]”, Oliver explained Sunday in a segment on his HBO show, “Last Week Tonight”.
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For $50, he set up a debt-buying company and named it Central Asset Recovery Professionals, or CARP, “after a bottom-feeding fish”, he explained.
To prove how easy it is to get into debt collecting, Last Week Tonight purchased its own debt acquisition company in MS for about $50. The show set up its own company to acquire $15 million worth of debt owed to hospitals in Texas, paying $60,000.
“On this episode, John Oliver advocates for vague milquetoast “reform” of the industry while making sure to encourage everybody who “can” to repay their debts”, the Debt Collective said in a statement.
In what he called “the largest one-time giveaway in television show history”, he forgave some $15 million in medical debt for some 9,000 Texans. Last Week Tonight even sent some people to a convention about debt collecting in Las Vegas, and the clips look like a parody of what we think terrible debt collectors are like as they cover collecting debts from individuals who have died and spitefully call the individuals they’re collecting from illiterate. The charity, which is now focused on buying up USA veterans’ debt, said it saw a boost in donations on Monday after the program aired.
American households are now responsible for over $12 trillion in debt, debt which can purchased by debt-buying companies for fractions of a penny and aggressively re-collected.
However, John Oliver, host of HBO talk show “Last Week Tonight”, has outdone her by doing something even cooler for people across the country. Debt buyers and collectors in America.
“We spent hours on the phone and email with [Last Week Tonight] explaining how we did our work and connecting them to other experts and resources”, the statement says.
In the United States, unpaid medical debts – sometimes decades old – are able to be purchase by third parties for a fraction of the price. Apparently this technically beats out Oprah’s “YOU GET A CAR” giveaway as the biggest television giveaway in history and so, with a cry of “FUCK YOU OPRAH!”.
Oliver called it the “largest one-time giveaway in television history”, trumping Oprah Winfrey’s auto giveaway in 2004. He almost doubled the previous record, when Oprah Winfrey gave 276 members of her audience a free auto, for a total value of just under $8 million.
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Oprah has a reputation for giving away tons of free stuff.
