Legal Question in Credit and Debt Law in California

Re: Civil Judgement

If you sued him for fraud without using a lawyer, you might have sold yourself short as fraud claims always merit extra "punitive" damages. Anyway, that's water under the bridge. Read the book, Collect Your Judgment, or call an attorney.

Re: Civil Judgement

I'm really sorry to hear that you were taken. Unfortunately, when the real estate market was taking off, people used that as a basis for a lot of "sham" investment schemes. Even now that the market is down, people are still pushing these deals, now to buy up under-valued foreclosures. In any event, you have taken the first step which is to obtain a judgment. Hopefully, you threw allegations of fraud into the complaint which may assist you in the event that he files bankruptcy.

Collecting judgments is just about, if not harder than actually winning the judgment. In this case, it sounds like he may have let this go to default, which means he did not file a reply at all. As such, he either believes himself to be judgment proof, or he intends to file bankruptcy and discharge what he owes you. In either case, its obvious he isn't going to vountarily pay you.

There are a number of ways to go about collecting judgments. Where you are dealing with properties that my have been fraudulently transferred, I'm going to suggest that you will probably want an attorney to assist you in collection. You may have grounds to pursue the property in question, and set aside the transfer if it was not legitimate, and done with the intention of hindering your collection efforts. As for the Mercedes, its probably a lease which is of no value to you as a creditor. You need to conduct post-judgment discovery through either written discovery or through a judgment debtor exam. In either case, it is intended to help you learn where his assets are or might be hidden, and then you can pursue them. At the very least, you need to record an abstract of judgment in every county where you believe he owns property.

Finally, you can sell the judgment, or hire someone to collect it for a percentage of what they collect. In either of these cases, you are probably going to give up a decent amount of the collected judgment for that work.

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