In the old days, creditors would write out a bunch of $5 checks and take them around to the banks in town to see which would take a deposit on behalf of the debtor. Creditors would also hire private investigators to follow debtors around, see where they are going to work everyday, and even steal their trash looking for offshore bank statements or other clues to hidden treasures.
Then, credit reporting agencies gave creditors instant access to a great deal of financial information on the debtor. Give me five minutes and the debtor's social security number, and can get a three-inch think dossier of the debtor's financial life (there are really expensive, up to $3 each). Oh, and this is totally lawful, since creditors by law have a right to run credit reports on their debtors.
Social media let creditors daily track the unwise debtor's spending habits -- I recall one debtor (not my case) who told the judge that she was totally broke bust and, streaming tears, told the judge that she couldn't afford to have her wages garnished, but then the judge saw her Facebook post about her and her (co-deadbeat) husband's upcoming two-week cruise to Australia.
The advent of GPS was a godsend to creditors, since they could now quit paying for a private investigator to chase a debtor around for a couple of week, but instead surreptitiously place a GPS tracking unit inside the debtor's bumper. Where is the debtor today? Just log-in, and look up. Where as the debtor been? Just look at the nice map with dates and times to the hundreth of seconds.
Google Earth was pretty cool too, although their satellite photos of the debtor's residence were often six months to three years stale. Still, one could get a pretty good idea of the value of the house and how many cars were left in the driveway.
And now there are drones.
I'm not talking about airplane-sized drones that carry Hellfire missiles, although there are some violent debtors out there for whom creditors would like to employ that technology. What I am talking about are the very small drones with very small but HD-quality cameras that you can buy for a couple of hundred bucks, and get good at flying in a couple of hours.
Drones now give creditors the ability to occasionally monitor the defendant's property with exacting precision. Car in the driveway? The drone will pick up the license plate number. New hottub? That is not an exempt asset.
But even beyond that type of surveillance, which is not likely to draw much attention, there are potentially more aggressive uses for drones. The more sophisticated drones can quietly place microphones around a residence to pick up conversations outside, or even on windows to pick up conversations inside. Illegal? Highly. But difficult to proven, even if a debtor could get law enforcement to take an interest in it.
Debtors tend to be pretty paranoid as it is. Just to have a drone flying around one's property is quite likely to drive a debtor to get his wallet out, even if the drone never picks up any meaningful information.
Obviously, this sort of conduct has dramatic implications for personal privacy, to the extent that it still exists in today's society. That is for somebody in a higher pay grade than me to consider (or really for all of us).
My point here is that drones have a potential to significantly benefit creditors to the detriment of debtors with assets who are dodging the former. The person with $20,000 in credit card debt doesn't have to worry -- creditors don't waste money on outside investigations of them anyhow. It's for the big-time debtors who have millions and owe more millions that drones could be a real game-changer, for those debtors who are playing fast and loose with the rules that creditors will also play fast and loose with the rules.
It will take years to see how all of this shakes out. Small drone technology, at least as it relates to that race between creditors and debtors that has lasted since the first caveman borrowed a club from the second caveman and didn't give it back, is very new. But it will be quite interesting to see how it all plays out.
Stay tuned.
This article at http://onforb.es/1zkozpx and http://goo.gl/oEo9aE
