Published Friday, February 10, 2023 by Alan Holdren

Harassment: trouble, worry, or torment, as with cares, debts, repeated questions, etc.

The general theme is throughout sec.806 of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act deals with the Harassment issue. Below you will see a direct quote of a section that gives the overviews of issues debtors and collectors should keep in mind when setting policies concerning with issue. You should stay away from fringe behavior that will insight orcontinually irritate a debtor when approaching them for the collection of a debt. You intentions should not be to make them mad, but to work with them in resolving the debt before you. You will have to constantly be the bigger person when dealing with their verbiage, insults and patterns of non-compliance with your wishes. Yelling, threatening them or insulting them will only land you in hot water with the FDCPA and possibly cause you as a debt collector to write a check and be sanctioned.

“A debt collector may not engage in any conduct the natural consequence of which is to harass, oppress, or abuse any person in connection with the collection of a debt. Without limiting the general application of the foregoing, the following conduct is a violation of this section:

“(1) the use or threat of use of violence or other criminal means to harm the physical person, reputation or property of any persons.

“(2) The use of obscene of profane language to language the natural consequence of which is to abuse the hearer or reader.

“(3) The publication of a list of consumers who allegedly refuse to pay debts, except to a consumer reporting agency of to persons meeting the requirements of the 603(f) or 604(3) of the Act.

“(4) The advertisement for sale of any debt to coerce payment of the debt.

“(5) Causing a telephone to ring or engaging any person in telephone conversation repeatedly to continuously with intent to annoy, abuse, or harass any person at the called number.

“(6) Except as provided in sec804, the placement of telephone calls without meaningful disclosure of the caller’s identity.

A couple other similar issues that come into play for FTC Commentary is unnecessary calls to third parties and multiple contacts with a debtor.

At Atlas, we are very careful in contacting or the sharing of information on any debt with anyone other than the debtor, parent of a minor debtor and allow for 1 to 2 contacts per 24 hr period. These techniques have yielded great results over the last 42 years. It will always pay dividends to yield on the side of caution and do not play these areas to aggressively.