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> Posted by Jeffrey Riecke, Communications Assistant, CFI

Thirty million Americans are currently being pursued by debt collectors. During 2012, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received 180,000 complaints about the practices of these companies – a 13 percent increase over 2000 levels and more FTC complaints than from any other industry. Troublesome practices seem to only be limited by the imagination, but some of the more reported-on ones are incessant calling at all hours and issuing unsubstantiated, misleading threats. Today the U.S. debt collection industry stands at over 4,500 companies and $12 billion.

To make matters worse, many of those being pursued don’t even have the debt in question. About one-quarter of the collection-related complaints the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) received last year were from individuals who were being wrongly pursued.

Debt collection happens, with some variation, in one of three ways: lenders carry out the collection in-house; third-party companies are hired and paid to complete the collection; or third-party companies buy a lender’s debt and independently complete the collection. In the latter case, collection companies buy individual’s debts from lenders for as low as a few cents for each dollar of debt and in return they receive a spreadsheet with basic information like names, phone numbers, and debt amounts. Collectors pocket the difference between what they paid to the lenders and the total they collect. It’s not uncommon for this spreadsheet information, intentionally or not, to be inaccurate or faulty. And even when a person is wrongly pursued, the consequences can be serious.

A popular debt collections practice brought to public attention in recent years thanks to legal suits centers on collectors taking debtors to court without their awareness (giving new meaning to the phrase blind judgment). Collections agents fail to serve a debtor a notice of complaint, produce a false affidavit claiming the individual has been properly served, and then proceed with a court hearing. The defendant, of course, does not attend, and so most often the debt collector wins the case and a default judgment is issued. (More than 95 percent of credit card lawsuits end in a default judgment, an automatic win for the collector or lender.) Such rulings could include the freezing of bank accounts, garnishing of wages, and they are very likely to reduce credit scores.

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