Credit Card Companies Begin Breaking Legs, Thumbs

Citing the struggling economy, many financial institutions have begun resorting to extreme measures to recoup money its debtors owe them.

In addition to skyrocketing default annual percentage rates, firms are sharply reducing their tolerance for delinquency while implementing more severe penalties for customers who don’t pay their bills on time, including having them beaten and their bones fractured.

In a letter Capital One mailed last week, the company warned cardholders that they will begin sending men over to break the legs of customers who fail to meet their newly elevated terms.

"Unfortunately, the extraordinary economic conditions currently affecting the country make these measures necessary," an obviously intoxicated Jack Prior, the Chief Information Officer of Capital One remarked outside Sugiyama in New York City, where his company was throwing a lavish party to celebrate its acquisition of Chevy Chase Bank with part of the $3.5 billion in federal bailout money it received last November.

"We’ve gotta make a living, and people gotta pay what they owe," Prior slurred before tipping over into a bush.

Evidently, many firms don’t intend to limit themselves to usurious rates and traditional beatings alone to deal with holders of outstanding accounts, as Brandon Little of Cleveland, Ohio can attest after forgetting to pay the $322 balance he had on his Citi card recently.

"I was standing at a bus stop when a man in a trench coat came up from behind me and smashed my knee with a crowbar," Little said, "He told me if I didn’t pay Citibank by the end of the week, he’d do the other one. So I mailed in my check, but before it was processed I woke up to find my new golden retriever puppy’s decapitated head on the pillow beside me."

Stories like Little’s and that of Beatrice Jefferies, an 83 year-old Sun City, Arizona woman who died of a heart attack after being shouted at and slapped in the face by a Capital One agent seeking to collect money she owed for the purchase of several prescription medications, have begun to embroil the offending firms in controversy.

"That’s a shame, about what people think about us and that old lady and all that. It’s really too bad," remarked a husky Capital One spokesman, "Even though the story I heard was our guy was simply having a nice cup of tea with the old broad when she just up and dropped dead all on her own. Course, if she’d paid her bills on time, maybe she wouldn’t have had so much stress.”