Here. Excerpt: While ACA maintains that its 3,500 members have "long been committed to making debt collection a more consumer-friendly experience," its idea of friendly stretches credulity. While the consumer bureau has proposed that collectors limit phone attempts to reach debtors to six a week, the ACA's idea was quite different — to limit "collection call attempts to no more […]
Category Archives: Debt Collection
Journalist Bob Sullivan emailed Advance Cash Services to elicit a comment on a consumer's story of how she had been dunned for a phantom debt. He didn't get the comment, but the collector sent him an email demanding he repay a payday loan that he never took out, for $935.76. His story is here.
by Jeff Sovern Brian posted this morning on the CFPB's debt collection proposal. I wanted to focus just on the validation requirements. Appendix F to the Bureau's proposal speaks to the validation notice. The Proposal indicates that the Bureau has conducted and continues to conduct extensive consumer testing of validation notices. I don't know what […]
by Jeff Sovern Here. It has more information than the article abstract, but is a lot shorter than the article. The article itself is here. In other debt collection news, Law360.com has its preview of the debt collection rules here (behind paywall). The headline: CFPB Enforcement Actions Could Guide Debt Collection Rules. UPDATE: InsideARM.com reports […]
The American Banker (behind paywall) and Bloomberg report speculations.
by Jeff Sovern We now have reason to believe that validation notices fail to convey to consumers the information Congress wants consumers to have. If the CFPB addresses validation notices in its regulation, courts can simply follow the Bureau's lead. But it could be years before that regulation takes effect. What should courts do in the […]
by Jeff Sovern We need to make some revisions to our validation article discussion draft, in Part V A.1., beginning on page 27, and captioned "Did Respondents Understand that The Letter Said They Could Dispute the Validity of the Debt?" Consequently, please don't use that part of the article until the new version is on the web. […]
Mary Spector of SMU and Ann Baddour of Texas Appleseed, Fair Financial Services Project, have written Collection Texas-Style: An Analysis of Consumer Collection Practices in and Out of the Courts, 67 Hastings Law Journal (2016). Here's the abstract: As many as forty-four percent of Texans with credit files have non-mortgage debt in collection; this is more […]
by Jeff Sovern As we have previously noted, the CFPB has scheduled a July 28 debt collection field hearing, and could announce the beginning of the SBREFA process, leading to a rule-making, that day. NCLC's April Kuehnhoff speculates that the Bureau will also release the results of its debt collection studies then. The Bureau's arbitration study […]