Scumbag Debt Collectors, Part 8

Leverage the internet in your war against debt collectors.

The Internet is a fabulous tool to find out information about debt collectors. Once you find out the collection agency’s name in your phone number search, you can run a Google search by the company’s name.

In more than one instance, I’ve found dirt on a collection agency that I ultimately used to make them stop calling. Many years ago, a debt collector started harassing me over a gym membership from several years prior that I had cancelled pursuant to the termination provisions in the contract.

When I ran a search on the internet, I quickly learned that the debt collection agency had been sued by the Georgia Attorney General’s office and paid a ridiculous fine for a regulatory violation.

The next time they called, I mentioned that I knew they had been fined by a state’s attorney general and threatened to contact the attorney general’s office to let them know that the fine apparently wasn’t enough because they continued to violate the law.

A few weeks later I received a nice little note apologizing for the harassing phone calls and stating that they had removed me from their database. I never heard from them again.