It’s bad enough to deal with calls from a debt collector. However, a phony debt collector calling to scam you out of money is even worse. Recently, the Federal Trade Commission settled charges with a California man who worked with a fake debt collection company in India. He and the company deceived Americans to the tune of $5 million over two years. While that bogus operation has been shut down and criminal charges are pending, we can expect that similar scams are in the works. The good news is that there are many warning signs that can give away a phony debt collector. Accounts Retrievable would like to help you spot these scammers so that you and your finances remain safe.
– One major thing to understand is that you cannot be arrested for having private debt. If you are being threatened with imprisonment or being told you are talking to a law enforcement officer, you can be sure it’s a scam.
– If you start asking questions of the debt collector and the story starts to unravel, it is probably a scam. Fake debt collectors will refuse to provide a written “validation notice” of the debt. This is a required practice under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
– The most suspicious demand will be a payment using a transfer service such as Moneygram or Western Union. This is a huge red flag.
The people who are often targeted by these scam artists are usually people who are in financial unrest. The scam artists are most likely getting information about these people from the internet so that they know who to target. They are counting on these people to be confused and overwhelmed about their debt and easily tricked by scare tactics.
Bottom line: ask a lot of questions and get your paperwork in order so that you know what you owe and to whom. These fake debt collectors are counting on people being unorganized and unaware of their rights. If you are educated and aware of your personal debt and the basic practices of a collections agency, then this is your best defense against a scammer.
Who hasn’t Googled an ex by now or found long lost friends and family through Facebook? The technology for finding people has been growing rapidly in the recent decades. Skip tracing has been a common practice for judgment collections companies since inception but with modern technology, debtors are having a harder time staying off the collections radar.
Judgment collectors used to have to sift through phone books, make extensive calls, and hound the neighbors in order to carry out skip tracing business. However the professionals in judgment collections businesses such as Accounts Retrievable have been able to utilize the digital trail that debtors leave behind to enforce judgments. The debtor doesn’t even have to be in the same state or country as the judgment collection company because with use of a computer or even a smart phone, debt collectors can track anyone down. Even police enforcement agencies are utilizing social media and social networking as a viable tool for solving and prosecuting crimes.
People are becoming more and more dependent on their smart phone. The benefit to skip tracers is that these smart phones have GPS hard wired into them and every app or function is usually geo-tagged when in use. The lines of right to privacy are more than a little blurred in this growing technology but as a judgment collector, this can be used to benefit your creditors. Even if a person is not necessary checking in on apps such as Foursquare or Facebook, their location can show up just from posting or searching.
With a little bit of know-how, social networking can be a great benefit for tracking down debtors. We can even track down those who are hiding out in other states dodging their child support payments or the judgment that has been placed on them. Skip tracing used to be an impossible job that required a large amount of foot work and paper work.
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Debt collection agencies are organized in order to assist credit card companies with their payment collections. In the last few years, the collection agencies have been very busy due to more people having a hard time keeping up with their payments. Usually, the work of collections agencies starts with one missed payment. This may mean that the debtor may have a late payment or an excess in the credit limit.
One way to deal with collections agencies is to contact the credit card provider as soon as you have incurred a late payment. By doing so, the company will see that you have the intention of working with them to get your credit card account on track. Credit collection agencies usually are willing to work with their clients just so they can keep their customers on their end. It is important that you are able to explain to them your situation and propose any solution that you may have on hand that may pacify the credit card company.
However, if things do not go the right way and you were not able to settle your debt on the right time, it may be possible that the credit card company sells your debt to a credit card collection agency. Usually, credit card collections agencies purchase the debt for cents on the dollar which is a small part of what you actually owe the credit card company. The collection agency would then push to gather as much as possible from you in order to boost their revenue. With this goal, there are some collection agencies who have debt collectors who are very persistent and are highly pursuant of the debtors.
There are of course some collection agencies who are very open and willing to work with the debtors in order to negotiate on payment schemes so that the debtor and the collection agency may avoid any legal action in the future. Going to court is very pricey and can take so much time and frankly, time is not something that both parties have on their end. It would be good if you can pay your debt at its full amount. With this proposal, some credit card collections agencies may even provide a discount for up to 25% of the original debt to honor your willingness to pay in full. It is very important that if this agreement is made, that you keep a record of this in writing so that both parties are informed and if something wrong comes up, you have the proper supporting documents with you.
There are times when further negotiations need to be made with the collections agencies in order to satisfy the customer and the credit card company. This can take a while but if no agreement is made, legal action may be put into place. it is still best if you can settle your debts as soon as you can and not go through the dreaded process that involved collections agencies which can cost you so much time and effort.
