The North Carolina Bankruptcy Information Blog

It’s a couple of years after your debts were discharged in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, you’re on track with your payments and expenses, and you’ve been working steadily to rebuild your credit. Now you’re ready to buy a new home: you’ve done all the homework, you’ve looked for good lenders and you’ve found your dream house. All you need now is to borrow what the house is worth, right? Well, not quite. If you have had some negative history on your credit report since your bankruptcy, you may need to come up with as much as 30% of the value as a down payment in order convince a lender to extend a loan to you.…

On the eve of Johnny Depp’s latest film about infamous Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger, a new kind of bank hold-up is being executed with unfortunate regularity around the world. Apparently, the rise of interactive online gaming has spawned virtual outlaws who literally rob businesses in their game’s virtual world and sell the loot to other players for the real thing.

In many online gaming environments, people gain power and social status very much the same way they do in the real world: with money. In the most recent case, which has helped establish the practice as a more common act of criminality, an Australian man arranged a scheme through a “black market” Web site for this very thing, to swap virtual dollars for thousands in real cash to cover a growing list of debts.…