Selling bad debt

Just reading up on selling bad debt...

After a while, the credit card company will sell your debt as part of a “bad-debt portfolio” (aka “charged-off accounts,” a bundle of many debtors’ accounts) to a collections agency or a third-party broker. The agency that eventually tries to collect your debt will have acquired it for about 4 to 7 cents on the dollar. From there, your debt can be sold or resold like any commodity, sometimes even after the statute of limitations has run. Often, people are not aware that a statute of limitations even exists, so they never question the debt’s current validity.