The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap Highlight

in a huge percentage of credit card cases, the cardholder never even sees the summons and consequently never appears in court to defend himself. For instance, in the year many of these cases were pursued, 2009, there were 240,000 filings of credit card suits in New York City alone. In an astonishing 158,000 of those cases, the creditor won a default judgment. “In two-thirds of the cases,” says Straniere, “no one even shows up.”