CAN I DO ANYTHING ABOUT BILL COLLECTORS?

gain, I must say that both as a practicing attorney since 1985 and as a collection agency owner for ten years before that as well as past president of the Georgia Collector's Association I have found bill collectors to be a really good class of people, comitted to improvement of the profession. They are largely well educated and personable with a genuine concern for providing a quality client service in an ethical and reputable way. Then, there are some persons and companies in this field lacking in state regulation in Georgia who are predators who have little regard for the law or for the people with whom they come in contact. If they harm our clients, we adress them in vigorous fashion calculated to make an impression.

This is a subject that is very close to our office. In my wild and wooly salad days I was a telephone collector (no, I didn't collect telephones) for a Nationwide Collection Agency then based in Houston, TX. Some of the craziness that we perpetrated upon debtors was exactly the reason congress passed the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act in 1978, two years after my wife and I started a collection agency which which is no longer in business. It absolutely amazes me what lengths some third party debt collectors will go to do stupid things to violate that law. This is important to you, for you have a right to your actual damages, plus up to $1,000 in statutory damages plus attorney's fees and costs of litigation. Want to hear more?

First of all, the Federal law only extends to third party debt collectors...those who are attempting to collect debts that they claim you owe someone else. Collectors include anyone in that class, such as collection agencies and attorneys, but the law doesn't cover creditors (although we have extended liability to creditors who did not clearly identify themselves). The law also only covers debts incurred for personal, family and household matrters, so commercial transactions are not covered.

Therefore, if a creditor is hounding you there is little you can do about them, for Georgia encourages payment of just debt and does not penalize creditors unless their tactics are so outrageous as to shock the concience and sensibilities of almost everyone. I remember a case where a funeral home couldn't get its money and dug up a deceased child and returned the remains to grieving parents'front yard in plain view of the mother. There was some discussion about whether even that rose to the level of Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress, but it was decided in favor of the consumer.

You can read the black letter law by going   here. The most common violations of the law that we see in our offices are:

• Improper wording of disclosures required by the act in the initial written notice sent to the consumer by the debt collector.
• Failure to send a written notice to the consumer within five days of the initial communication in connection with the collection of a debt as required by the act
• Poorly worded collection letters that suggest that the collector will do something it doesn't plan to do or cannot do
• Improper communication about the debt with persons other than the debtor or those allowed by law
• Improper communication content with persons other than the debtor when seeking debtor location information
• Improper use of post dated checks, without required notices of intent to deposit
• Lawsuits against the wrong person
• Attempted collection after the expiration of the applicable statute of limitations
• Attempts to collect fatally flawed contracts or notes
• Improperly using criminal prosecution to collect checks written to creditors
• Creditors who try to make debtors think they are third parties
• Creditors who negligently (or intentionally) select unscrupulous debt collectors to represent them

In the last few years, industries have been buying charged off debt for pennies on the dollar aggressively attempting to collect the entire balance charged off, interest that may double or triple the amount and, in many cases, collection fees as well. We frequently find them

• Lying about the character, amount or legal status of the debt
• Refusing to verify the debt when asked
• Filing lawsuits to collect bogus, paid out, time barred or non-validated debt
• Screaming at, tormenting and abusing consumers and persons in no way connected with the debt
• Reaging the debt and separately reporting it to consumer reporting agencies

and the list goes on, and on, and on...it is my experience that mistakes sometimes get made, but more often than not we see these violations viewed as a cost of doing business. There are Defendants that we regularly sue who now just call and ask how much...that's awful, but they won't change the way they do business for an occasional relatively minor lick. Notice that we did not include communication directly with the debtor as one of the primary reasons for getting us involved. That is because most debtor-collector communication is private and incapable of independent verification. If a debt collector calls you a lying deadbeat on the phone there usually ought to be some other violation or a reliable witness before we will get involved with the matter, but we do still have cases where the debt collector makes threats it does not intend to carry out, calls third parties (like employers) to discuss the debt, and places calls at illegal times or unusual places known to be inconvenient to the consumer.

If you think you may have been abused, you are invited to contact our offices for evaluation. Bring all written communication with you. Perhaps we can help.

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