Why do bill collection companies still stick with phone and mail to collect their debts? Today's youth and young adults are all about the facebooks and texting. Some don't even bother to have a voice line and only have email because so many online places require one.
Just got a call from a bill collector trying to reach someone, and they had the wrong number - my number - for some reason.
Go find them on the internet and bug them there! Stop calling me - they aren't at this number.
(though now that I consider it, I suspect that there are legal protections to using the phone and postal mail for debt collection.)
I'm gonna go ahead and bring my 13 years of debt collections experience to bear here. I don't get to do it often.
Yes, there are legal ramifications in regards to electronic attempts to collect a debt. It is illegal to disclose a debt to someone other than the debtor or someone who is a designated affiliate of the debt (spouse, anyone who has provided paperwork that they handle the finances of someone, such as someone who is developmentally disabled or otherwise unable to conduct their own finances) per the FDCPA (Fair Debt Collections Practices Act).
We were able to do it at the hospital ONLY because their account was tied to them personally through their medical records. Mail is permitted because it's a federal offense to open someone else's mail so it's not the agency's fault if someone jacks your mail illegally.
Debt collectors DO use a vast array of people searching software and there is a great deal of skip-tracing done to track down debtors who have fallen off the grid. This is entirely legal as long as the person calling doesn't disclose that they are attempting to collect a debt. It's HIGHLY illegal for them to do so.
The core of the FDCPA is that you may ONLY discuss a debt and its collection with the debtor themselves or the aforementioned representatives or spouses.
Emails break this law because there is no way of legally proving that the account belongs to the person that you think it does.
All that being said, there are really horrible collection agencies that will break these laws and eat the fines associated with them if anyone actually gets the yin to actually attempt to pursue legal action against the debt collector.
Also, the FDCPA doesn't apply strictly to first party collections, so if it's the business that you owe money to, they have much more leeway.