Everyone wants to eliminate illegal robocalls-including debt collectors. Here’s a look back at what industry groups are doing to help ensure legitimate business calls get through, but IRS scams and promises of free vacation packages are turned away at the gate.
8/30/2018 8:00
Last fall, Lee Snyder told his father—and boss—Eric Snyder, president of RBC Inc., about an interesting phone call the company had received that week. A consumer had gotten a call from an unknown number— RBC’s number—and looked it up online to learn more about who was calling. The online directory correctly identified the caller as RBC, but also added one word to the company’s description: scam.
The consumer, however, recognized RBC’s name and called the company back, telling the collector what the website had said.
“Lee came to me a few times about this and I just kind of rolled my eyes, like, ‘Oh, now what?’” Eric Snyder recalled. “We all know this is a tough industry and it’s so challenging to keep ahead of all the changes, and so I didn’t really give it a lot of thought. Honestly, I chalked it up to my son being relatively new to the business, and maybe a little sensitive.”
But just a few weeks later, Snyder got a call from fellow ACA International member Leslie Engle, vice president at Team Recovery, who mentioned a curious phenomenon she’d noticed: her company’s callback rate—not just consumer calls, but all business calls—had suddenly dropped precipitously, Collector magazine editor Anne Rosso May and Maria Wolvin, who served as ACA International’s vice president and senior counsel, report in the June issue.
“She said that someone told her it was because her company’s listing on whitepages.com was labeling it as a scam,” Snyder recalled. “That’s when things started to come into focus. I immediately logged on to both 411.com and whitepages.com and sure enough, both sites were calling my company a fraud and a scam. That’s when my hackles went up. How could these sites unfairly slander and malign my company like that?
As it turned out, these sites were just the tip of the iceberg. Snyder and Engle are two of the many members who have notified ACA over the last year that they have been negatively impacted by call labeling and blocking tools—from third-party websites and apps as well as those from the telecom providers themselves.
Given the critical importance of effective two-way communication to the debt collection process, this has become a serious issue that threatens the fundamental ability of debt collectors to communicate with consumers to share important account information and resolve outstanding debt. ACA believes that the unintended negative effects of robocall processing tools will only get worse without intervention.
In the report, Rosso May and Wolvin cover why robocalls are becoming more of problem, how call blocking affects debt collectors and consumers, potential solutions and what ACA members can do.
ACA International continues to engage with regulators such as the Federal Communications Commission to ensure effective solutions are in place and legitimate businesses are able to communicate with consumers as needed. As part of those efforts, in June ACA submitted comments to the FCC regarding its interpretation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
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