Mark shares stories of collectors behaving badly that he saw or heard about while working in-house at collection agencies, from impersonating police and false threats to privacy breaches, identity theft and fraud.
Transcript
Why I know what collectors did
Between 1994 and 2006 I worked as a collection agency lawyer, at various times for four of the largest collection agencies operating in Canada. My office was located on the premises of the collection agency. I would just have to open my door, and outside it there might be as many as two or three hundred collectors. I had regular contact with collection agency management, ownership, senior executives and collection staff, and on my coffee breaks and at lunch I would socialize with these individuals. So I either observed a lot of behavior myself, or these individuals shared stories with me.
Impersonation and threats
Some individuals try to avoid speaking with a collector. I can recall one collector getting really frustrated, and what they did was impersonate an OPP officer. They called up the debtor's workplace and informed the person who took the call that the debtor's spouse had been involved in a serious car accident, and that was how they got the debtor on the phone.
I can also recall some collectors making threats. Some would threaten people with unpaid accounts that they would contact Children's Aid and have their children taken away. Some debtors were new Canadians, and some collectors would call them and threaten that if they did not pay their unpaid account they would be deported.
Privacy and identity theft
Back in the 90s it was fairly common for some experienced collectors and skip tracers to have a contact who worked at Bell Canada or a utility. If the collector was trying to locate someone and get a current address or phone number, they would reach out to their contact at Bell Canada or the utility to find current contact information. Today things are a lot stricter about privacy, and if an employee of a utility or phone company were caught giving out someone's contact information, I assume they would be fired.
I can recall one particular collection agency where they had to fire some people. A collector will typically have about 300 accounts that they have access to, and with each account comes a substantial amount of personal information about the debtor, including the debtor's credit report. My understanding is that one collector was gathering the personal information of the people whose accounts they had access to, and then selling it to people engaged in identity theft. After this incident, that agency had the floppy drives removed from all the computers in the office, because at that time they were using floppy drives. They wanted to make it impossible for people to copy information onto any type of drive and remove it from the office.
Fraud
Some collectors would be speaking with a consumer who had an unpaid account and say, listen, we can give you some kind of a discount on your payment if you pay cash, and I'll have ABC Courier come and pick up the money. Well, there was no ABC Courier company. The person who came to pick up the cash would be the collector's friend, so the collector and the courier would get the cash. A collector might do this for two or three months and then move on to another collection agency before getting found out.
Eventually they do get found out, because at some point somebody else would be calling the consumer asking for the money, and the consumer would say, hey, I've already paid this. But as long as the collector moved from one collection agency to another every three months, he might get away with it for a while.
Humiliating a consumer
I can recall one story that was told to me. One collector called up a wife. I'm not sure if it was a joint account or if the husband owed the money. The collector informed the wife that what she should do was take all the electronic products in the home and put them out on the boulevard, so that at 5:00 p.m. the sheriff could come by and collect all these items. You have to appreciate that in this particular case neither the creditor nor the collection agency had sued the consumer, so they had no right to seize any of the consumer's property. At five o'clock or shortly thereafter the husband comes home and sees all the electronic products out on the boulevard. This would have been very humiliating for the family.
What I do now
I have a firm called Debt Coach Silverthorn. We have all kinds of articles and YouTube videos that are helpful for people who are struggling with debt. I also provide one-on-one coaching, including coaching for people who are interested in settling a debt with a creditor. In that circumstance the consumer offers to make a one-time lump sum payment to the creditor or its authorized collection agent for significantly less than what the consumer owed, as settlement in full. In many instances it's possible to negotiate settlements for as little as 15 or 25 cents on the dollar.