U.S. PIRG Consumer Blog: Maxed out consumers: victims of unfairness in lending

The new, and acclaimed, indie documentary on credit card debt, Maxed Out, is opening in select cities (find yours) around the country this week. Here's a nice review titled A Horror Movie For Our Times by the Washington Post's Michelle Singletary. We're working with both Maxed Out director James Scurlock and the new consumer coalition Americans For Fairness In Lending (or AFFIL) to maximize the movie's message that unlike crime, high-cost debt does pay. It pays credit card companies and debt collectors, with your money.

As reported by Stuart Elliott in today's New York Times in the story Critics of Lending Practices Adopt a Harder Edge, AFFIL is rolling out a series of message ads in major magazines this spring calling for restrictions on unfair lending practices. MORE:

The ads depict unhappy families and their meager possessions in makeshift circumstances, as if they were evacuated or rescued from nature's wrath. In each instance, readers are told that the "crisis," "tragedy" or "disaster" was caused by "credit card debt," a "400 percent payday loan" or a "late mortgage payment" rather than, as they would expect, a natural calamity. Depicting the effects of "abusive lending practices" in that provocative manner "really helped people understand it much better," said Howard Benenson, chief executive at Benenson Janson, compared with other approaches the agency tested.

We're especially concerned with the growth of high-cost credit card debt being pitched to college students. Watch for updates. [And by the way, you can catch my non-speaking cameos standing next to my fellow witness -- MBNA's Louis Freeh (yes, former FBI director Louis Freeh) -- during the Senate Banking Committee scenes near the end of Maxed Out. Here's a fast-loading Youtube version of the movie trailer.]