When John Oliver spent 20 minutes Sunday lambasting debt-buying companies on his show, Last Week Tonight, an Arkansas lawmaker found himself briefly in the crosshairs.
Nearly 12 minutes into his diatribe, Oliver called out Rep. John Vines, D-Hot Springs, for his 2013 sponsorship of HB 2028, "An Act To Regulate The Practices Of Credit Card Issuers; And To Establish The Terms To Be Used In Credit Card Transactions."
The show then cut to Vines speaking about the bill during a hearing in 2013.
"All this does is define credit card and other terms germane to credit card usage," he said.
But then Oliver resumed.
"That bill actually defined the term 'creditor' to include debt buyers and established a 'presumption of correctness' of information in favor of the debt buyer," he said. "That is a very friendly deal for them or anyone like a bank who would want to sell to them."
Oliver also noted that Vines' wife works for a bank, specifically BancorpSouth, according to his campaign website.
The HBO host described the debt-buying process as banks and credit card companies selling their customers' debt to a debt buyer at a discount. The debt buyers can then try to extract the original amount of debt from the customer. Oliver added that debt buyers can sell their purchased debt to other debt buyers.
When the debt is passed from company to company, so is the personal information of the customers, which includes Social Security numbers and addresses. Oliver gave examples of customers being harassed for debt they no longer owed and ones that received threatening messages from debt collectors.
Oliver ended the show by forgiving nearly $15 million in debt after he formed his own debt-buying firm.
Vines' HB 2028 passed the House (83-0) and Senate (23-3) and was signed into law April 22, 2013.