Back in the good old days non-payment of gambling debt was a threat to your knee-caps. Today, you might get cut off from Klarna and have to extend your next auto loan to 256 months.
This was with their credit card. You're going to get demolished if you start bouncing gambling debt on a credit card.
I'm guessing that at some point, probably not very long from now, credit cards are going to cut down on this. They don't want to be held responsible for a bunch of debt from gamblers, when they've already paid the sites.
At some point, the fees won't be worth the combination of PR and actually losing money from bankruptcies / delinquencies.
> You're going to get demolished if you start bouncing gambling debt on a credit card.
If you do not have assets or high income, you can just ignore debt and it will drop off you credit report after 7 years. They can try to sue you (unlikely for <$5k debts) and then try to garnish wages (max 25% of aftertax income) but many states outright prohibit garnishment for consumer debts (like Texas) or limit it (like CA - just show that you have high living expenses to avoid garnishment).
> You're going to get demolished if you start bouncing gambling debt on a credit card.
If you look at the finances of a good swath of Americans, they're already demolished. Heck, the average new car loan is now 6 years with a $700+/month payment.
Gambling has become such an embedded part of the current cultural zeitgeist because people feel they have nothing to lose.
Most of those gambling sites don't have merchant accounts and aren't able to accept credit card payments directly. Customers take out cash advances or buy cryptocurrency through various shady intermediaries, then transfer the assets.
Loan sharks that use threats still exist, non-bank personal lending funds use cold calling and connections with bankers and use non-staff third party callers to distance themselves from the consequences and reputation of threatening with violence.
So it's not like people need to go to shady lenders in the first place, they can be pipelined from normal credit card debt into less scrupulous debt collectors.
Does cold calling still works? I get so many spam calls that unknown numbers just go directly to voicemail that I check every other week or so. Pretty much everyone around me does the same. I do not remember when I got last legitimate call - it's all spam now.
The link you have is about business debt - that's likely much more collectable than CC debt.