Listen.
Complaint
anon
Country: United States
Afni handles 3rd Party collections (the original creditor still owns the account and hired them to collect on the amount) and they also handle Debt Purchase (the original creditor sold the account). Afni is a very legitimate company. They have original files and records in 3rd Party showing exactly where the debt had came from and what dates. They have been in business for 76 years and have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau (bbb.com). There are several factors that are put into play when collecting a debt especially with all of the different clients they handle, so please - do some research before assuming they are a fraudulent company. Afni has several locations and they are a world wide company. Has is a fraudulent company able to not only report to your credit, but also obtain an A+ rating and be in business for almost 80 years? Don't believe everything you read online folks! You call in, cussing up a storm - no one is going to want to help you. It's your debt, you know it... if you don't remember, inquire and we will gladly tell you all the information we have on file. Be calm, be courteous. I have worked for Afni for a few years now as a Debt Purchase and Third Party collector.
Comments
They went after me for someone else's debt. They flat out refused to tell me where they got my phone number, but it was obvious to me that they got it out of the phone book.
As to the BBB, you can buy yourself an "A" if you make a big enough donation.
"Afni is a very legitimate company. "
AFNI has a history of consumer complaints going back years reporting attempts to collect from the wrong person, including attempting to convince people calling to dispute unowed debt that they cannot dispute "debts" they don't even owe.
"They have original files and records in 3rd Party showing exactly where the debt had came from and what dates. "
Irrelevant, and also deceptive, as it portrays asking AFNI about their own information as some way to resolve a dispute with a debt collector. AFNI's copy of any records is not a reliable business record of the original creditor. FDCPA gives consumers the right to dispute and request proof of alleged debts be obtained FROM THE ORIGINAL CREDITOR. AFNI's own copies do not meet this standard, and their attempts to pass off their own documents as "validation" are fraudulent.
"They have been in business for 76 years and have an A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau (bbb.com). "
Again irrelevant. The pre-sale AFNI might as well be a different company from the current one.
As for BBB, they bought their "A+" BBB rating by "joining" and paying them off, in mid-2007, when they were in the middle if sending millions of "erroneous" bills for old Verizon accounts to consumers who did not owe them, and were getting a black eye from thousands of consumer complaints of fraud on ripoffreport and other sites. Without them, AFNI would get even more AG complaints, so the money paid is well worth it. They even removed the Minnesota AG's "government action" from their report after only a few months, like it never happened. BBB in Illinois is a well paid "lap-dog".
"There are several factors that are put into play when collecting a debt especially with all of the different clients they handle, so please - do some research before assuming they are a fraudulent company. "
Consumers doing research can still examine the thousands of consumer complaints against AFNI on ripoffreport that surged in January 2007.
They can also read the decision by the Federal judge in Corr v. AFNI, that their routine letter (apparently written by Lisa Anderson) responding to disputes was materially deceptive in violation of FDCPA.
They can also read the Minnesota AG's press releases on 2 investigations of AFNI for sending "erroneous" bills to Minnesota residents or unowed "debt" and failing to properly handle disputes.
And they can read Chris Hoofnagle's academic papers analyzing FTC "id theft" complaints over the period from 2006 through 2008, which show a spike in Verizon and AFNI connected FTC complaints as AFNI employees were telling consumers calling to dispute "debts" that "it must be id theft".
"Afni has several locations and they are a world wide company."
So what? There's a fraudulent telemarketer in India, that has several call center locations, and "is a world wide company" but ALL their "products" are scams and all their charges are fraudulent.
" Has is a fraudulent company able to not only report to your credit, but also obtain an A+ rating and be in business for almost 80 years? "
The CRA's are worse [***] than even BBB. Pay them money, they will do anything for anyone.
They sold their services to fraudulent debt collectors in California for years, who used it for fraudulent
shakedowns of unowed debt. The FTC case is still winding through the courts, but the perps closed up shop and opened again under a new name, same shakedown racket, and still buying from the CRAs like nothing ever happened.
More recently, they are selling credit reports to Russian id thieves who buy them with stolen credit card numbers, but they will sell YOU, the victim, their "credit monitoring" services, so you can find out after it happens.
"Don't believe everything you read online folks! "
Expecially from those who making money by convincing you.
"You call in, cussing up a storm - no one is going to want to help you."
People still calling in and cussing you out? You just don't get it. You are sending bills to people who don't owe them. You got caught, over and over. You don't think there is some connection between sending fraudulent bills, and getting cussed out?
" It's your debt, you know it."..
Yeah, keep repeating the mantra, "These are the deadbeats we're looking for". That's what they teach you. Statistics and court decisions say otherwise. You cross the line, game the system, "park" "erroneous" accounts on credit report, pretty much do whatever you please, since nothing counts until you get caught, and then you get a bunch of free chances to fix it.
"if you don't remember, inquire and we will gladly tell you all the information we have on file. "
Too many people remember real well. They know when they never lived in some town or even some state. They know then never lived at an address years after they moved. You've been caught lying so many times, you can even map out your various scripts.
"Be calm, be courteous. "
Better yet, don't call at all. Really no reason to waste time in any manner that doesn't lead to a lawsuit if that is the only effective end game.
Send a dispute letter, mailed certified. Dispute "errors" through the CRAs. And when they bungle the "validation" get an attorney and sue. That's really all they understand.
"I have worked for Afni for a few years now as a Debt Purchase and Third Party collector."
You must be living in one of the depressed parts of the US, and can't get any better job.
I've tracked your antics for years.
I learned a lot, about deception, escaping resonsibility through "plausible deniability", how to lie with a straight face, both to consumers, and to employees so they can do the same, while appearing "caring", how to buy a reputation with BBB, and maintain status in the industry (that's not saying much, apparently) and how through it all, the statistics don't lie, despite all the denials. It's been interesting.
http://dockets.justia.com/search?query=AFNI
You might find it interesting to plot lawsuits per month, and compare against company revenue (dollars per lawsuit), or company employment (lawsuits per employee).
Correction:
The 3 state class action lawsuit was Hale v. AFNI, in 2008.
http://dockets.justia.com/docket/illinois/ilndce/1:2008cv03918/221638/
Here's Judge Coar's decision:
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district ... 3918/221638/83/
So, a new generation of 'industry insiders' is trying to salvage their self-created, collective reputation.
This one is pretty obvious - to a certain degree, they all are.
Along with the 'Hey, we're really the good guys' schtick, there are the posters who show up claiming to be 'ex-collectors,' always sympathetic, always drawing some sort of distinction between the 'bad' guys and the 'good guys,' the later of which the poster is presumably a member.
Take a look at this:
https://800notes.com/forum/ta-5f527ff24a1f09e ... eld-has-changed
Ex-collector even went to the trouble of populating the thread with a post of two from 'sympathetic' posters.
Like I said, so transparent.
Basically, you have two halves to the industry, large companies handling assigned debt on commission with clients who still have an interest in retaining current customers, and all the rest out to earn a quick buck. That lumps the junk debt buyers like PRA in with the out and out scams like the Corona, Buffalo, and south Florida clusters, but the difference in the end becomes a matter of degree. If they are buying portfolios, in the absence of sufficient penalties for illegality, their own economic incentives will drive them increasingly toward not just non-compliant behavior, but "deniable" fraudulent behavior.
FDCPA started with $1000 statutory penalties in the 1970s, and the statutory component is still at $1000, after almost 40 years of inflation.
Actual damages and attorney fees are not by themselves sufficient to contain deliberately fraudulent behavior by players that just do the math and figure an occasional payoff as a cost of business, since the mathematical expectation (average payoff) for fraud is actually in their favor, even after considering litigation risk..
That additional statutory penalty is increasingly insufficient to overcome the uncertainty of litigation for technical violations, limiting the legal actions that contain the fraudulent behavior to the most eggregious cases where the additional costs of proving actual economic damages can be justified. Add to this the risk that even on winning a judgement, the damaged consumer and his attorney will then be faced with the problem of collecting from the common fly by night operators that just close up shop and move down the street to reopen under a different name, still running the same fraudulent shakedowns.
If routine violations are not contained by the legal remedies, then they become the norm. That allows the more clever players to play a deceptive game to their advantage, deliberately hiding behind uncertainty and litigation costs to operate further through deceptive and fraudulent collection, now building up expertise in this practice.
Just as bad money drives out good, bad fraudulent debt collectors may grow at the expense of the legally compliant ones, bidding up the cost of these old portfolios that may actually be worth more to them because they will lie and cheat to collect, just as they also gain advantage from paying employees as "independent contractors" with no withholding or unemployment insurance.
Our inadequate penalties are actually teaching the worst violators how to violate better, driven by the economic advantage it gives them against their legally compliant competitors.
If you look at the math, what you can expect is increasing growth of the cheaters, up to the point they collapse when lawsuits and prosecution finally catch up with them, all driven by the effectiveness of lying and threats in collection compared to legal compliance. Catastrophe theory says you get repeated growth and collapse cycles, with increased unrecoverable fraud losses to victims, much like you would get with uncontained Ponzi schemes..
"Advice" from the interview? Work with the debt collector to resolve the issue, yet NO MENTION of filing an id theft complaint with law enforcement, which is the KEY ACTION that victims of id theft must take to get fraudulent accounts removed from their credit reports.
AFNI has a history of complaints of not only deceptively alleging accounts were "id theft", but then stonewalling consumers trying to then get the account information on this "id theft".
Hmmm...I can think of identical issues with this industry going back to 1980. The only significant difference I see today is that there is an internet and forums like 800notes and complaintwire where the wronged parties can publicly complain. No such venue existed 'back in the good old days' - as ex-collector would have us believe they were. In sum, the only reason why it seems so much worse now is that the complaints are finally seeing the light of day.
I can pepper this post with an extensive litany of recollections from those so-called good old days but I'll let it rest with only one - the readers of this post will be grateful for my brevity! ;-)
Some years back, I held a position as an independent contractor with a national medical billing agency doing some technical writing. As a 'sort-of' employee of this company, I was invited to attend a Christmas party thrown for this particular office by the collection agency who bought up their uncollectibles. Keep in mind that this was not long after the year 2000.
I had an interesting conversation with two of these collectors: both of these people claimed to have been in the collection industry back in the 1980s - they were both plenty old enough - and both bemoaned 'how hard it was to conduct business these days.' I asked them why. One of them, and the other agreed, claimed that with all the knowledge about consumer protection statutes and public forums where people aired their complaints so freely, it was getting difficult to collect. They complained that everyone knew 'their rights' these days and even if they didn't, they just go to 'one of those internet whiners' sites' and tell everyone what a fraud the agency is. One even went on to talk about how she'd been able to 'trail' a debtor back when 'things were normal' that she'd been in contact with to a store where this debtor bought a home entertainment set (I shudder to think about how it was that this collector came to know what the debtor looked like, more stalking and trailing, I'd guess) - back in the 1980s, this probably would've amounted to an item worth about $1000 - so that she knew that there was an asset. She then went on to brag about obtaining a judgement 'on the quicky quicky' and sending their repo guy to the home of the debtor to pick it up. Keep in mind that these were reminiscences from the so-called good old days when collection agencies were so 'different.'
I know that I sound like a broken record, but, prepare yourself, I"m going to say it again: In a society that prides itself as being based upon the rule of law, third party collections has absolutely no place. This is an industry that can only thrive if laws are broken and, with a wink and a nod, go unenforced. And, well, unenforced law is an invitation to anarchy.
That alone says she is embroidering her story, for dramatic effect. Although there are a number of local "rent to own" companies who might try it,
To actually "trail" (or stalk) a debtor would mean a local agency collecting on a local account, more like conditions in the 1980s or earlier. Now, population is mobile, credit is instant, and collection agencies are national, mostly collecting by phone.
The main problem they are complaining about, that "everyone knows their rights", really just shows that they got used to "blowing smoke" and lying their a**es off, and it's not working like it used to. They probably criminally defrauded and extorted people in the process, although they will never admit it even when they get caught. It's all the fault of the "deadbeats" even when they get the wrong person. They want us to just accept that "deadbeats" make them robocall the wrong people 10 times a day, for months, which their systems "can't" do. That's the excuse they offer on this site, when they come here to [***].
Repeatedly calling strangers to aggressively berate them over "debts" that they may or may not even owe is pathological. Deliberately subjecting your brain to such treatment, "believing" lies for years, must be producing shifts in judgement of reality, much like that faced by undercover cops or deep cover moles, unless they are already sociopaths who take to the game like fishes in water.
This shows up if you look at the split between the "caller" dupes and the "closers" in the Corona Scam, or other shakedowns. The innocents may take a while to recognize the fraud, but once they do they feel betrayed and move on. The sociopaths keep thinking they are "right", as they have so warped their reality as to accept fraud as normal.
You wouldn't recommend that anyone you love marry one, any more than you would want them to marry any other swindler or con artist.
The psychological effect of the tactic is much like the approaches police use to elicit false confessions. It's basically a form of psychological assault designed to produce specific mental effects that impact the ability of the target to respond rationally. Psychological assault and abuse result in shut-down of the prefrontal cortex (responsible for rational higher thought, including reasoning through a con), by the lower more emotional brainstem. Whether thought through, or just intuitively understood by the sociopathic "debt collector", the tactic works to the advantage of the predator, especially when targetted at victims who have never experienced it, like "mistakenly" targetted "debtors".
Abuse isn't just abuse because it's illegal, or not nice. It's a deliberate tactic that improves success with "erroneous" or fraudulent collection, which may explain why abuse and harassment accompany "errors" so much. It just works, and debt collectors know it.
Oh, they "document" their compliance, compartmentalize their operation so no innocent employees have to know the bills are bogus, and train them in how to "excusably" act rudely while evading validation, but management knows the whole game, and at that level that's really all this "business" is.
Maybe so. But blowing smoke and lying their a**ses off is still criminal behavior and it was happening 50 years ago just like now.
Really, there was no spotlight on this business until people started b*tching about it online. In all honesty, I can't figure any significant difference in their behavior over the past fifty years. That's how I see it.