In April, I published a blog post covering a New York Times story about outsourcing collection calls to India. In this article I maintained that any violations of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), harrassing phone calls, threats, revealing information about the debt to someone who is not the debtor would be the responsibility of the U.S. Based company.
The company may employ call centers outside the U.S., but ultimately, it’s the parent company based in the U.S. which will be held liable. For instance, Encore Capital Group (also known as Midland Credit Management, a major collector in the US) employs call centers in India, and they provide the scripts for the customers, and do extensive training. Since Encore are instructing the collectors what to say, they would be held liable for misdeeds of any collector. It would be the same for a U.S. based collector who makes a call for a collection agency, you don’t sue the collector, you sue the company.
The question is now: When collection agencies have centers in Panama, India or anywhere out of the country how are they held accountable for privacy and protecting personal information?
It is the same for the privacy information. Obviously, the collectors outside of the U.S. would have access to SSNs, work data, credit cards, etc. What if there is a computer breach of the network or computer system of a call-center in India? If a foreign-based call center violates U.S. privacy laws, and they are making the calls on behalf of a U.S.-based company, it would be the U.S. based company who would be legally liable.
An even scarier prospect is how are we to know if a computer security set up in India has been breached. Is it announced in the news? Noticed? What do you think?
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Students College Financing // Aug 20, 2008 at 4:44 pm
One thing I try to tell my students, is that when they have problems paying for their Student Loans, before considering any Debt Consolidation, they should first talk to the provider of the financing. Most Students don’t realise that their Loans can be re-writen with new terms to help their situation.
2 Improve Your Credit Score // Sep 3, 2008 at 11:29 am
A good question. Yes, I’ve seen and noticed many call centers and Collection agencies are from India, uk, Canada and one call center for magazine subscriptions was even from inside a prison in the U.S. As for collection agencies…well, first of all, yes they are supposed to act in accordance with any law of a company they represent. The problem is,… they aren’t really concerned either way. Think about it, why are they even calling you? You owe money. And since it’s a collection agency, that means it’s been a long time since you made any payments on the particular account their calling about. The bottom line is, they know they’re in the power possition and when it becomes who’s word is taken first, they always come ahead. So the only power they have, is the power you allow them, and unless they manage some kind of judgement on you against property or your wages (if there is any) then there’s not much they can really do but annoy you.
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