Your Next Debt Collection Call May Come From India
Just when you thought a debt collector was calling from America, it turns out, that call is more likely than not from India. That is right, you may be getting a telephone call asking you to pay a delinquent bill straight from Gurgaon, India. These bill collectors sit in cubicle farms thousands of miles away, calling more than 100 customers a day.
A recent story in the New York Times highlights this growing, and disturbing, trend.
Encore, based in San Diego, is one of a growing number of collection agencies training and employing foreign nationals in India and elsewhere around the world for pennies on the dollar. Many Indians, at most, bring home $63.00 a month.
When outsourced employees from Indian are being trained, they take on an American name in case the consumer asks their name. Having an American name does not make them American, especially if they do not know the American lingo or their English is lacking. Consumers can routinely tell when a call is coming from abroad, and are clearly not as stupid as the debt collectors think.
This all begs the question of whether it is possible to take a foreign national and force them to adhere to the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Will these mild-manner folks, unschooled in the nuances of American syntax, be savvy enough to resist the urge to cross the line between legality and illegality?
More to the point, in the case of litigation against a debt collector for violations of the federal consumer protection laws, will the defending companies produce their employees for depositions? In such third-world countries it is often impossible to locate former employees due to lax record-keeping at the local level – so how would an aggrieved consumer even find the proper offending debt collector?
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