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Why is the Social Networking angle a canard? Because it isn’t where you access the information that’s the problem: It’s the method you use to obtain that information and then what you do with the knowledge after you have it. For instance, if you try to “friend” someone on Facebook in order to collect a debt, you are already in trouble because you are “misleading” and “duping” that person. It should come as no surprise that this is a violation of the law. It may be legal to find out who somebody’s friends are, contact them and hope to get contact information, but there are all kinds of data bases and public records and, heck, Google, that do a much better job of same, without all the painstaking legwork. As far as taking “advantage” of people goes: If someone really is stupid enough to put the name of their employer on their public page, well, whose fault is that?
If you run a clean shop like my employer does, you do the following as part of the normal course of conducting business:
- You tape record every single call that comes in or goes out of the facility. It protects you, the customer, and keeps scurrilous attorneys from suing you just because they “can.” (Even though many still do, ha ha.)
- You conduct criminal background checks and engage in drug-testing where applicable and legal. I don’t have any jailbirds working for me – see the ABC News link again for what an ex-con can do to grievously harm a collection company, not to mention the bank it represents.
- You create a culture of rewards and consequences for good and bad behavior. Smart companies pay bonuses when complaints are kept to a bare minimum; they also withhold bonuses, lower commissions, and of course fire managers and collectors who get too many. You terminate a top producer because he figures he can do whatever he wants with impunity, and those that are left will figure it out. Funny how that works.
- You use common sense: Who is going to pay a bill collector who verbally abuses and talks down to them? Especially when you can just hang up the phone, or, better yet, send a tape of the whole sordid episode to the 10pm news?
I could spend all day pontificating about how odious and immoral some deadbeats are, and how vile and reptilian the plaintiff’s bar who represents them can oftentimes be. In the end, though, it’s up to the individual agency and collector to get it right: Treat others the way you would want to be treated (although don’t forget the backbone and the b.s. detector, aka street smarts), and you’re gonna do way better over the long haul than the guy who thinks he could be a good foot-soldier at Soprano Collections, LTD.
