Who doesn’t love a good text message? Painless, fast, and no talking on the phone to that annoying person you have to get in touch with! There is no arguing with the fact that texting is becoming a major conduit for the exchange of information. It is no wonder that there were practically 750 billion text messages sent in the United States last year, nearly twice the amount of text messages sent in 2008.

As far as debt collection goes, collection agents have remained outside of the cellular realm up to now. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act was a hallmark federal law that took effect in 1978 and has set up strict guidelines about how debt collectors can call and when. Because this act is even older than the stereotypical “Saved By The Bell” cell phones from the early 90s, it just might be time to make some major adjustments to this antiquated law. But experts say that any change to this law would have to come from consumers looking for change, not the collectors.

Under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, if a debt collector is to get in touch with a debtor they need to deliver what is known as a “mini-miranda” which is a statement that lets the debtor know that the contact is an attempt to collect debt. This leads to problems with the 160 character maximum length of many text messages. Another problem is determining who will pay for the text. Currently, there is no way for a collection agency to determine if a debtor has a plan that includes unlimited text messages. Can you imagine if you got a text message from a debt collector that you had to pay for? That would be outrageous and highly illegal!

Another potential issue for bill collection agencies is being sure that the debtor definitely owns the cellphone. For example, the consumer might be utilizing a company owned cell. That company could very well be monitoring the usage of the cellphone, which might lead to illegal third party disclosure issues if debt communications were sent by text.

Sadly for the collections industry, Congress must vote on American taxes, cap and trade, insurance and a slew of other issues first before it can get down and really tackle this text message issue. So it seems like time will tell.

Mallory Megan works for Rapid Recovery Solution and writes articles on commercial collection agencies Also published at In Time, You Might Just Get A Text From Your Debt Collector.

Welcome to debt collection 101. Here you will learn the ins and outs of debt collectors, otherwise known as account or bill collectors, or collection agents. The main job of a debt collector is to locate a debtor (a person who owes money to a creditor) and to try to collect payment on accounts that have gone delinquent. There are two kinds of debt collectors. The first kind is the most common. These are called third party collectors, and these people work for a third party collection agency. What happens in these situations is that a creditor will have a delinquent account that it will hire out to a third party collection agency, who will then tell the third party debt collector to collect on the creditor’s behalf.

The second kind of collection agents work directly for the original creditors and are called in house collectors. In house collectors are not bound by many of the rules of the FDCPA and the creditors that they work for are generally businesses based on finance, such as mortgage and credit card companies, healthcare providers, or utility companies.

No matter who they work for, collection agents all have similar jobs: to locate the businesses or debtors, and to inform them that they are late on payment. Usually this will be done over a phone conversation, but sometimes debt collectors send letters.

Some of the time debtors are not so easy to find. Sometimes they could move without leaving a forwarding address, or new contact number. At times this is because they don’t want collection agencies to be able to trace them, other times this is simply a mistake or they have forgotten to.

At times like this collection agents may speak with the post office, former neighbors, telephone companies, and credit bureaus to try to determine the new address. This activity is called “skip tracing,” and the collection agents who do this have computer systems automatically track when businesses or people change their addresses or contact information on any of their open accounts. To Be Continued In Parts 2,3, 4, and 5

Mallory Megan works for Rapid Recovery Solution and writes articles on commercial collection agencies. This article, Debt Collection Course For Beginners: A Lesson In Skip Tracing is released under a creative commons attribution licence.

“Jury duty scams” have existed for some time now, but they are making a comeback! A jury duty scam goes something like this: an identity thief will call you and inform you that you have missed your jury duty. He will aggressively tell you that this is against the law, and then ask for personal information from you that he supposedly needs to prevent you from getting arrested. However, if you provide this scam artist with what he wants, you could lose your identity, and gain a lesson from the school of hard knocks.

When a conman calls an unknowing victim, the recipient of the call will obviously allege that they never got summoned for jury duty, because they never did get summoned. The conman will reply that they will need to verify that and determine if they are talking to the right person, and to do this they will need your social security number and your birthday.

This scam is an oldie, but apparently still a goodie, and as the recession gets worse, more and more scam artists seem to be making their ways out of the woodwork. A similar scheme that attempts to collect telephone information has been spreading via the Internet also. Emails will let their unsuspecting victims know that their telephone number is being doled out to telemarketers, and that to put a stop to this, they have to call a number in order to be placed on the government’s “do not call” registry. If you call the number, you will then be prompted to give out more personal information that thieves can pirate and use.

The thing that identity thieves are very good at is putting a puzzle together so that they can create an identity to manipulate out of yours. The “jury duty scam” is just one example of ways that these crafty criminals get the information they desire. Normal rules for jury duty summons include filing out a qualifying questionnaire. You cannot get a summons if you don’t fill out a questionnaire, and if you have been selected for jury duty, a summons is sent out a couple of weeks before the month that you are expected to serve on jury duty. This has been normal protocol for at least twenty years, and there are no plans to change it.

A legitimate call regarding jury duty will never ask for a birth date or social security number. Know that this information is where the money is at for identity thieves and that this is the specific information that they will most likely target in one of their schemes. Also keep in mind, that if you are being asked for information, no matter if you are sure whether you are being scammed or not, go out of your way to verify that what the person asking you is claiming is true, and do not simply give in to them, no matter how aggressive they get. Standing your ground can be worth a small fortune and a whole lot of trouble in the long run.

Mallory Megan works for Rapid Recovery Solution and writes articles on medical collection agencies. Unique version for reprint here: Warning Signs To Look Out For When It Comes To Identity Theft.