Tens of thousands of debt collection cases move through metro Atlanta courts each year, but a Channel 2 Action News investigation found many defendants never respond to the lawsuits against them.
Channel 2 Consumer Investigator Justin Gray sat through full debt court calendars in Fulton County and analyzed a random sample of 1,000 debt lawsuits filed in Gwinnett County.
The investigation found that among cases in the sample that resulted in a judgment, 74% ended in default judgments. In 97% of those default cases, defendants filed no answer at all…