Echoing comments made by Thomas Pahl at RMA International’s conference earlier this year when he was still at the Federal Trade Commission, another FTC employee has said that the agency will continue to focus its enforcement activities on deceptive debt collectors.
Speaking at a conference in Dallas, Jim Elliott, the FTC’s assistant regional director for the Southwest region, said that the FTC will go after the worst of the worst when it comes to ferreting out bad actors in the ARM industry.
“We’ll continue to look for those egregious debt collection practices such as threatening with false arrests and lawsuits,” Elliott said, according to a published report. “We’ll continue our enforcement proceedings and bringing actions against those egregious practitioners.”
Elliott said that in some cases, the reports of illegal behavior come from inside the companies that are breaking the law.
“We have a variety of ways of finding things out,” Elliott told attendees during a Q&A session. “Our consumer database for example also contains insider information. There are company employees that believe there is something going on … and we receive [complaints] from insides who say, ‘Here’s what’s going on, I think you should look into it.’ And sometimes we do actually look into those complaints.”
