I'm sure our situation is a bit different than most of the stories on here as this is still somewhat of an unspoken practice. We recently sold annuity payments. Payments tath were awarded to my husband, as a result of a very bad accident he was in in. We took this risk in order to take that final step of getting out of 4 year battle in regaining our creditworthiness because we wanted to do it on our won (not by filing bankruptcy.)
We were put in this position after losing our jobs when our place of employment (family business) burnt to the ground and the crooks who insured the establishment (Elevators Mutual Insurance) financed a full fledged witch hunt in order to get a arson conviction, so they didn't have to pay and not only was the local prosecutor dumb enough to fall for it, false reports filed and literall 100's of mistaked made by the "state" fire investigators most of shom had also been sued previously for their inability to competently investigate the cause of a fire. But that's another (very long) story.
Anyhow we sold some (the remaining guaranteed) payments to Patriot Settlement Resources in hopes of "getting ahead". Evertyhing seemd to be going ok at first then time and time again I'd have to refax forms to them or get a hold of the other parties involved (insurance Co's etc) myself because these people could jsut not get it together and their follow-up was horrid. And we were unable to cancel the contract after 10 days, so ok we're in it for the longs run. This is initally introduced as a 90 day process (which turned out to be more like 180) and fees legal and otherwise are paid by them, all we are responsible for was a financial consultation so we understood what it is we were getting ourselves into, or losing, for immediate financial relief.
Mind you this is all supposed to be legal and binding as it now has to be approved by a judge (to protect all parties). The problems occurred once it was approved, suddenly everything we had discussed beforehand. Ex. Payments sold previsouly and needed to be paid off that were disclosed to them on day 1 (of which I was later accused of being a liar), the 1000.00 dollars that was missing from the contract verbage on the agreed to sales price and was going to be sent to us in a separate check was suddenly all foreign to the very people we had been conversing with via email (so I have documented all of this! From day one!) and phone.
The legal fees for the second court appearence that accrued due to their lawyers inability to be prepared for court with documents I had supplied them with more than a week ahead of time, and the fact that he was before a Judge he'd not dealt with before and was obviously not used to be opposed, were indeed charged to us contrary to their claims, another 836.00 dollars (which just happens to be the same amount of the monthly payments they are getting). They even threw in some "hold back fee" which we were never told about that amounted to another 1600.00 this I did end up getting 2 moths later after weekly emails to the "owner".
So to this day I am still out more than 1836.00 dollars we had agreed upon. I'm still unsure why I got the holdback fees and not the other 1000.00 I was promised and the 836.00 in legal fees they were responsible for, trust me it's not like they didn't make anything from this transaction they netted over 40k.
Be very careful with these people, eveythings fine and dandy until you challenge their practices and they realize your not just another idiot they can take advantage of no questions asked. (they actually disclosed the inferior mental capacity of most of their clients to me previous to this also).
Beware.
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