Another News Outlet Gets Collection Agencies Wrong

The Working-for-You folks at NBC affiliate WAVE3 out of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (quick: name the other three commonwealths), has a news story up from yesterday with the headline “Debt collectors pushing for more rights.”

It’s a short piece — not even 120 words — that’s long on misinformation and misrepresentation.

The thesis of the article is: debt collectors are pushing for changes to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. “The changes proposed so far,” the article explains, “would allow them to contact you on your cell phone, or even social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.”

That’s…not entirely true. “Meaningful disclosure,” one of the benchmarks of the FDCPA, makes it impossible for the collection industry to ever look at social media sites as an effective means of communicating with debtor clients. With the example of Facebook, a collector would have to honestly disclose himself and his affiliation to the debtor through a “friend” request. If the debt collector ever then made a public post on the debtor’s wall, it would be an immediate disclosure violation.

Twitter, too, carries with it too many disclosure risks.

But, of course, it’s more exciting to all-caps it: DEBT COLLECTORS WANT TO INFILTRATE YOUR LIFE. The actual story, that debt collectors want to serve their clients by recouping bad debt while helping debtors get back on track financially — well, that’s a lot more typing and uses a lot fewer scare terms. Debt is embarrassing; it’s easier to deal with it if you turn collectors into enemies.

Even more frustrating is that they’ve buried this quote — and the lede (fancy journalism talk for “main point”) — far into blurb. It’s from Mark Schiffman, Public Affairs Director of the Association of Credit and Collection Professionals (ACA International):

“The laws themselves are fairly unclear in how they treat these new technologies. So, what we’re primarily seeking is clarity so that we make sure we’re using them correctly.”

What’s not in that quotation from Schiffman are the words “pushing,” “more,” and “rights.” What collection agencies are looking for is clarification and guidance as technologies, and the way consumers interact with those technologies, change overnight. When the FDCPA was drafted back in 1978, people primarily communicated in cave paintings, grunts, phone calls, and paper mail. (Kids, get your grandparents to explain an envelope to you.) Answering machines were a luxury, not a default, and thank god the Internet didn’t exist then or I’d probably be a lot dumber.

But again: that’s not the story consumers want to hear. They want to feel threatened by collection agencies so that not paying back the debt becomes an odd act of patriotic retaliation. It’s a myth designed to comfort, the way most myths are designed to comfort. However, the myth also further separates us from the reality, and regardless of how monstrous we’ve decided to paint the collection industry, the debts still exist and need to be paid back.

The Working-for-You folks are working for you — they’re just not doing a very good job.