Oliver’s show, “Last Week Tonight”, engages in a form of investigative comedy, and showed the abuses of some of these companies who try to collect on debts.
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“It’s pretty clear that debt buying is a grimy business, and badly needs more oversights”, Oliver said. “And it was disturbingly easy”.
Mr. Oliver went on to explain that his show spent $50 in April to incorporate a debt acquisition company in Mississippi. He called his company Central Asset Recovery Professional, Inc, or CARP, “for the bottom-feeding fish”. Once CARP had purchased the debt, Oliver was given the social security numbers of almost 9,000 citizens in debt, which, as he explicitly stated, endowed him with the horrifying ability to potentially harass and ruin people’s lives over their medical debt. Once he set up the company, he said he received an offer to buy $15 million of unpaid medical debt for less than $60,000.
If you didn’t already have an intellectual crush on John Oliver, the goofy Brit with the biting wit, Sunday’s episode of “Last Week Tonight” might have left you no choice.
The largest debt-buying corporation, Encore Capital, claim that 1 in 5 consumers either now owes or has previously owed them money. These predatory collectors make an effort to recover the debt which they have bought with all kinds of means starting from threats to aggressive tactics without even validating the accurate details regarding the debt under question.
In the end, Oliver believes that he bested Oprah Winfrey’s famous and record-breaking $8 million vehicle giveaway.
Since leaving the The Daily Show for HBO, John Oliver has been killing it on Last Week Tonight where each and every week he sheds new light on a topic that most people don’t know too much about.
“F-k you, Oprah”, Oliver quipped.
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The debt portfolio the show had purchased through CARP would be transferred to RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit that works to forgive medical debt without worry of tax ramifications for debtors, Oliver said. “I am the new Queen of Daytime Talk!”
