Hacker News Reader

Comment by ascagnel_ | Hacker News Reader

It may have been changed, but the headline of the linked article (as of approx. 8:30AM EST) is literally "U.S. Marshals didn't really arrest a man for missed student loan payments". Failure to appear (the reason he was arrested) has long been accepted as a reason for a judge to issue an arrest warrant.

> According to a statement from the U.S. Marshals Service, Aker repeatedly refused to show up in court after being contacted several times. The agency said Aker told them by phone he would not appear in court to answer the summons. Disobeying a court order is a criminal offense. Within a few months, the judge issued a warrant for his arrest, which the U.S. Marshals carried out. So, yes, Aker was arrested, but not just because he owed a little student loan debt. He was arrested for disobeying a court order.

View on HN

>According to a statement from the U.S. Marshals Service, Aker repeatedly refused to show up in court after being contacted several times.

If some one called my home on the telephone and said "I'm a US Marshal, send money to pay for a 20 year old debt." or something to that effect, I'd probably interrupt the caller to tell them to put me on their Do Not Call list and then immediately hang up the phone before they ever got the chance to explain half of it. I've received much more creative attempts than that to scam me out of money over the telephone, and I'm sure that I'm not alone in that respect. I get calls from scammers all of the time, and in related news the IRS has recently warned people that scammers are calling and using that exact same pattern but pretending to be collecting an IRS debt instead of student loans. Therefore there is zero chance that I would take a telephone call like that seriously since there is zero way to authenticate the caller. We don't know whether other the marshals tried anything other than the telephone to contact Aker, but I've seen no comment from them to indicate that is the case. Assuming they've only contacted him by telephone then the proposition is that we must all obey anyone who calls us on the phone and claims to be a government agent.

That's not how people are served court summons. It's usually done in person after the carrier confirms your identity by name.

I know and I found it odd that they only mentioned contacting Aker by telephone. It sounds strange, and probably isn't the whole story, but that's what my local (Houston area) station's news coverage indicated.

I doubt they only contacted him by phone; instead, that phone call was likely the only response he gave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com