Sharon McCann

Of Victims And Suckers

In November 2006, Money magazine printed an article called Hello Sucker: Why smart people get scammed. The article discussed the cases of several people who were taken in by small time scams, and one man who was defrauded by a Ponzi scheme. The article gives four pieces of advice regarding getting scammed, the first and foremost piece was: don’t trust your family and friends. Caveat emptor run amok.

While the article referred to these people as victims, it also referred to them as suckers. What is it about the American ethos that makes us so certain that victims are always self chosen? Why do we say that a behavior is illegal, but still blame the person who is victimized by the behavior rather than the perpetrator?

When I was approached to go public with our story, I hesitated. I knew what we had faced as this debacle unfolded. I suspected the reaction would be harsh. Did you notice how many times the phrase “you should” appeared in the responses to my earlier posts? Hind sight is always 20/20. Arm chair quarterbacking is great fun. And if we sing in the dark the monsters won’t get us. We all fall prey to the idea that we are smarter, faster, stronger and these terrible things won’t happen to us. We convince ourselves that it cannot happen to us, that we will prepare better, know more about what we are getting into than that other person who was stupid enough to be hurt by someone else’s illegal behavior.

When you hire a plumber, do you go to plumbing school before you turn the task over? How do you go about choosing a cell phone plan? The demon of obscurity and double talk, cell plans baffle even the smartest and tech savvy. At some point, on some subject, everyone has to turn over their trust to someone that they hope knows what they are talking about. We cannot all be lawyers, surgeons or plumbers. How much exactly can we expect the “average” consumer to know? Much of the law is based on what the average citizen could be expected to know. Somehow, in the last 30 years, average citizens, by the court standards, have become incredibly smart. Over and over, the system abandons people who have been hurt in this way. Other people look away, as if the victims had exposed themselves in public.

But, people deflect the point, or refused to read it. Never once did I use the word “abolish”. Overhaul, the term I used; means to fix, to make major changes. What do I propose?

There are several problems which became clear to me during this experience; bankruptcy laws heavily favor businesses, both as bankrupt parties and as creditors. Not all contracts are created equal, and the bankruptcy law needs to recognize that. In the case of builders, the home owners are not creditors. The builder did not owe us any money. We did not release funds to him, the bank did, as part of administration of the construction loan. He simply cost us money, which meant that we had no claim until we got that judgment. As Cyrus pointed out, arbitration is expensive, and the costs are demanded up front. Two other families involved in this case lost every penny they owned. In one case, they had already sunk everything they had into the construction, and were left with a partially constructed shell that was not weather tight. Unable to come up with more money to complete the project, they defaulted on their construction loan, and walked away with absolutely nothing. They could not afford arbitration, and thus had no judgment against the builder, no claim as a creditor. By the time we wended our way through arbitration, any and all, assets that the builder had were gone. Mandatory arbitration is useless, and Cyrus summed up the reasons very well. Judgments against businesses, particularly those held by individuals, rather than other corporations, should not be allowed to be discharged. Builders need to be forced, at the federal level, to carry performance, or surety bonds, for all of their projects. The laws regarding builder behavior should not be a patchwork of laws enforced by paper tigers.

Posted at 9:40 AM, Jan 19, 2007 in Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)