In my over five years in collections industry (both representing collection agencies and representing consumers) it is my personal opinion that it is rare to find a “Bad Collection Agency”.  My firm receives thousands of calls every week and sure, there are “repeat offenders”, however, most of these agencies are not “Bad” in and of themselves.  The “repeat offenders” are usually the largest agencies, with the most employees, with the largest number of accounts.  Its no surprise that certain collection agencies are always in the news for violating the law.  If one agency has twelve employees and another has thousands, statistics would dictate that the agency with thousands of employees will get more complaints against them than the agency with twelve.

However, there are certainly bad debt collectors; individuals who are so greedy and will go to any extreme to earn their bonus checks.  Most, if not all, collection agents are paid bonuses for reaching certain goals.  This system certainly contributes to the frequency of violations, but incentivising employees is not an unusual practice.  I will, from time to time, publish information on lawsuits that I have filed.  Please keep in mind however, that just because I sue XYZ agency over and over doesn’t necessarily mean they are a “repeat offender”.  Its likely that the agency is so large that its simply due to statistical measures that they are repeatedly being sued or, to their dismay, they hired a rogue collector.

Jeffrey Hyslip

FairDebtHelpers.com is a department of Legal Helpers, P.C./Macey & Aleman that I started in January, 2007.  FairDebtHelpers.com focuses on enforcing the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, (FDCPA) the Federal Law that regulates how Collection Agencies and Law firms must treat consumers when attempting to collect debts. FairDebtHelpers.com has been in existence for almost two years now and we’re finding that a lot of the people that contact us have the same questions, interests, and comments.  As such, we figured it would be interesting to create a forum to discuss the FDCPA, my experiences/thoughts about the industry, etc.  I’m not really sure the path the blog will take and only time will tell.  I imagine I will keep the blog rather informal and doubt it will contain a lot of legal nuances.  However, when I started the FDCPA department at Legal Helpers, P.C./Macey & Aleman I never dreamed that in less than two years we would be the largest FDCPA law firm in the Country; so who knows what this blog will turn into.  I welcome your feedback, thoughts, and questions.  Just so you know, I am not a debt collector trying to collect a debt.

Jeffrey Hyslip