Hey S*** Face
Abusive Bill Collectors
By Daniel Muniz

The debt collections company Nationwide Collections sent a letter to S*** Face, who is someone who had a delinquent account with Columbia House for $16.39. Nationwide began their collection letter with Dear S***.

For people who have been harassed by abusive collection agents, the only difference here is that this bill collector actually put the profanity in writing because it is usually done verbally. Overall, collection agencies have acquired quite a nasty reputation for using heavy-handed tactics that are blatantly illegal.

But the bottom line is that a debtor cannot give a collector what he or she doesn’t have. It is as simple as that and no amount of harassment is going to alter that harsh reality. The problem arises when the collection agency erroneously assumes that they can squeeze blood out of a turnip so they continue their harassment. And because of the big commissions involved, the tactics that the collectors employ can be brutal.
 

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For example, one friend of mine loved his job as a bill collector. His sleazy employer not only allowed their collection agents to use profanity, they encouraged them to make threats of violence and to use any means necessary, including lying, to make someone pay.

As a result, this guy relished every opportunity he had to yell and threaten debtors on the phone. He would tell them that since he had their address he was going to kick down their front door and kick their [EXPLETIVE DELETED] if they didn’t immediately pay the full settlement.

To him, it was all a game and he loved playing it.

When he was on the phone, he could quickly size up which personality type he was dealing with and then accordingly push the right buttons to achieve maximum impact. Typically, most people have an innate fear about something and his goal was to find out what it was so he could exploit it.

For instance, he loved getting women on the phone because a lot of them would break down and cry. Instead of using threats of violence, he would claim that these women were going to lose their jobs, lose their children to Child Protective Services, and wind up in jail.

My friend was also a big beefy guy who played basketball on the varsity team in high school so using threats of violence against men didn’t bother him. If given a choice between flight or fight, the men who would choose flight offered him the opportunity to exploit that fear. Of course there are the guys who would choose to fight and some of these irate people would locate the collection agency and storm inside the office. All collectors use a desk name to hide their true identity and in this case, for their own personal safety against a livid debtor.

Years ago a private investigator worked down the hall from a place I used to work at and I got to know him fairly well. He told me that he spent 95 percent of his day lying on the phone trying to find debtors. As a result, he bragged that he could find just about anybody anywhere in the country although some people took longer than others to locate. In fact, he said that the only people he could not find were the ones who assumed a new identity by identity theft or who had slipped into the fringes of society like being a vagabond or a drug addict.

One of his favorite tools was humiliation.

This private investigator loved to talk to the parents of the people he was looking for. He would weave a story about how he would be forced to notify the authorities in which their son or daughter could spend years rotting away in jail. This guy was a pro at manipulating the fears of a parent. He also targeted siblings and friends of the debtor because they would be very cooperative since they thought that they were preventing a loved one from going to prison.

Employers also represent golden opportunities for humiliation. Although it is bad enough that friends and family know about money problems and are incessantly hounded by bill collectors, the situations worsens when your boss and co-workers get involved and have to put up with harassing phone calls.

Of course all of these tactics are illegal.

The reason that unscrupulous collectors use them is because they are extremely effective and the rewards are huge. There was one time that I dropped off my debt collector friend at his workplace. He pointed out all the fancy cars in the parking lot that belonged to the best collection agents. Those top performers made big bucks by being abusive. Interestingly, their success encouraged my buddy and his fellow co-workers to become even bigger pests when they were dealing with debtors.

One doesn’t have to look very hard to find the horror stories of abusive bill collectors. Although there have been collection agencies that have been penalized and even prosecuted, many collectors get away with it because bullying and intimidation silences people. Some debtors just take the abuse and not report it.

In addition, there are people with good credit that see no absolutely no problem with bill collectors who break the law because they feel that these debtors are deadbeats anyway and that they deserve it.

But two wrongs don’t make a right. And allowing abusive collectors to flourish encourages them to engage in even more illegal activities. For example, bill collectors are beginning to harass innocent people who are in no way connected to a bad debt. Some of these people end up paying for a collection that doesn’t belong to them just to escape the harassment.

Our economy needs collection agencies but it doesn’t need abusive collectors who dehumanize and intimidate people.

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