What Is a Bankruptcy List?
You may have recently become legally bankrupt after filing for either Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy. In the weeks after your filing, you may have noticed you’ve been receiving a lot of extra mail and are wondering what exactly is going on. What happened was you were put on a bankruptcy list.
A bankruptcy list is probably something you’ve never heard of before, so here is an explanation. Once someone files for bankruptcy, that fact will be released into the public domain. Also included will be information about the bankruptcy case and personal information such as that person’s mailing address. This may seem like a violation of privacy, but it is unfortunately completely legal and part of the bankruptcy process.
Once this information about a person and their bankruptcy case is released into the public domain, there are many companies who want to get their hands on that kind of information. Certain companies will hire people who will search through this public domain information to find names to add to what is called a bankruptcy list.
The purpose of building a bankruptcy list is so these companies can have the ability to sell this information to other businesses for the purpose of marketing. Indeed, marketing to people who have filed for bankruptcy has become a very lucrative business. Companies that are likely to buy this kind of information are businesses targeted towards providing consumers who are facing economic hardships with financial services. Examples of such companies are businesses that provide debt counseling services and lenders of high interest credit. These companies will then use the street addresses provided in the bankruptcy lists to send flyers, offers for services, and other advertisements through the mail.
Actually, some of the information sent may be useful to people who have filed for bankruptcy. If you have an inability to manage your debt or find a lender who will give you credit, you may actually find some of the mail sent to you from these businesses useful to you.
Unfortunately, due to these bankruptcy lists being so easily available to any company willing to flip the bill for this kind of information, you are also likely to find a lot of junk mail as well. Some of it may even be from companies trying to fool consumers with offers for what only appears to be legitimate financial services. In reality, these may be scams designed to fleece money off of anyone who does not read the contracts mailed to them closely enough. For this reason, you should be extra careful when agreeing to any offer sent to you in the mail after filing for bankruptcy. Make sure to read all the fine print closely and do additional research into the companies offering the services to make sure they are indeed completely legitimate.
This of course may leave the question of what you should do to stop the mail. Unfortunately, there is no good answer. If you request to be taken off of one company’s mailing list, you will eventually be added to more. Dealing with mail from bankruptcy lists is certainly one of the negative consequences of filing for bankruptcy.
