Recently heard of a church purchasing $3.3 million in resident debt for 15k and then cancelling all of it.
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As an addendum to all this, if you want to evaluate the good that the church did from cancelling the debt, the purchase price is what’s important, not the nominal amount of debt. The vast majority of that debt was never going to be paid, and even when the church cancels it, the credit rating agencies still record that the person did not pay their debt. For the people who weren’t going to pay either way, the cancellation doesn’t change their lives much.
The collections agency was willing to sell all that debt for $15k, which means they didn’t anticipate collecting much more than that. So that means the cancellation prevented somewhere in the neighborhood of $30k in debt payments, depending on how much of their own time the collections agency was considering investing in harassing the debtors. The main benefit in the arrangement made by the church is that nobody spends ~$15k on people making phone calls to debtors. This is certainly not a productive activity and, if anything, is actively harmful to society and the people who live in it.
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