World’s Largest Debt Collection Operation Settles FTC Charges, Will Pay $3.2 Million Penalty

The world’s largest debt collector has been fined $3.2 million by the Federal Trade Commission. Expert Global Solutions(EGS) and its subsidiaries have agreed to stop harassing consumers with allegedly illegal debt collection calls. The law they violated was the number of times they could contact the same phone number in a certain time frame.

EGS was running a campaign which would contact their debtors multiple times in the same day, moving the user from one campaign to another. Voicent software does not have any restrictions on the number of times you can call someone, nor does the Voicent software know if you are a debt collector. Clearly the campaign that EGS was running that generated them revenues of $1.2 billion in 2011, was successful at collecting the debt, however there are other legal ways of getting a positive return.

Voicent’s Call Center Dialer / Agent Dialer / Predictive Dialer has an integrated alternate-phone system allowing you to specify multiple phone numbers for a single campaign. In some states(Contact your local attorney for FCC/FTC laws in your area) you are allowed to use multiple contact methods to attempt to reach the person you want to collect debt from, which in most cases will double, or triple your return rate.

In the above picture, you will see some Alternate Phone options. They are:

• Call Failed
• Call answered by answering machine
• Call answered but there is no response or confirmation
• Always call alternate number

The above options, will let the Dialer escalate the calls from one to another depending on what you check. If you want the system to call alternates in the case a call fails, or one is answered by an answering machine, or call is answered but there is no response or confirmation. Lastly, you can tell the Dialer to always call the alternate number. The Alternate phone system is part of our Call Center Suite, specifically a feature within the Voicent Agent Dialer.