For Attorney General Brian Frosh, the realization -- after a seven-month investigation -- is obvious.
This set of occasions makes my blood boil," Frosh advised CBS News. "It seems to me like sophisticated and really aggressive oldsters targeting the maximum vulnerable people in our society -- folks who are negative, folks that are cognitively impaired and those who're young and unsophisticated."
Frosh is now suing Access Funding and related entities, alleging they duped as a minimum 74 sufferers of lead paint poisoning in Baltimore -- people like Crystal Linton, who suffered lead poisoning as a toddler and was left "functionally illiterate."
To guard her future, she acquired a $630,000 established settlement, making certain month-to-month exams for the next 40 years.
But after getting fliers from companies promising quick coins, Linton offered her destiny payment flow, then valued at $408,00, for just $sixty six,000, some of it to Access Funding.
Linton advised CBS News she failed to apprehend the way it worked -- or how she signed away her money.
"It became exploitation in its worst shape," Frosh stated.
The legal professional general says $17 million in bills to victims vanished. Now, through the lawsuit, he is looking to get their money lower back.
In response to people who might say the alleged sufferers were adults who made their own choices, Frosh responded, "Sadly, that can grow to be being the case for many of these people."
Attorney Earl Nesbitt is with the National Association of Settlement Purchasers, and represents a number of those businesses in courtroom.
"It's very unlucky what occurred in Maryland," Nesbitt instructed CBS News. "But it would, I think, be a mistake for every body to decide the entire enterprise or each transaction by what came about in an isolated location regarding a specific funding business enterprise."
Frosh stated he would not buy that reaction.
"I might be astonished if it had been handiest going on here," Frosh said.
CBS News reached out to principals from Access Funding however did now not hear again. In preceding court docket filings, the organization known as the legal professional widespread's allegations "wrong" and "scurrilous."
The corporation said it made disclosures and these were voluntary income, all permitted by courts, and claimed it definitely lost money.