Attorney Asks, "Why Do Collectors Continue to Violate the Law?"

Attorney Paul A. Herman, Esq., gets asked this question a lot: “Why do collectors continue to violate the law knowing that they could be hit with a statutory penalty and have to pay the consumer’s attorney fees and costs?”

And boy, does he have answers!

“The bottom line is that it is still extremely profitable to disregard what is considered legal and ethical, with regard to debt collection.”

He goes on:

“With most violations only costing up to $1,000 per violation, the courts have generally interpreted that to mean the type of violation versus the number of violations. Thus, even if someone makes numerous harassing phone calls, they may only get charged for that type of violation instead of $1,000 for each harassing call.

Even with attorney fees and costs, if the collector is only going pay $4,500 from an FDCPA lawsuit and the debt exceeds that amount, the debt collector is still in a position to make money from the debt collection. If, statistically, they can get away with collection violations nine out of 10 times, it becomes financially worth it for them to continuously break the law in order to collect on a debt.”

Collection attorneys? Agency owners? What say you?