Sean Letcher, a debt collector for 15 years, alleges serious unethical conduct is widespread in the industry. Photograph: Penny Stephens/The GuardianFifteen long years in the debt collection game, spending his days hounding people for unpaid bills and loans, left him shattered.
The company does not have records stretching back that far and so couldn’t check the allegation, but said it was committed to “treating all customers with respect and in line with the ACCC’s debt collection guidelines”. “Over my 15-plus years of experience I cannot ever recall feeling the relevant bodies have put any pressures on these companies to act in an ethical manner,” he says. “Perhaps something may happen on a case-by-case basis. But who has looked at the entire picture as a whole?”
He also sent an agent to a debtor’s child’s school and made false threats to debtors that their non-payment would damage their credit rating in relation to debts that could not possibly have that effect, practices that consumer advocates and lawyers have separately raised with Guardian Australia.“You’ll see this used a lot on younger people or the elderly or folks with limited English,” he says. “That’s debt collection 101.
But two sources say they have collected for a predatory lender that would deliberately skirt around payday lending restrictions to loan to vulnerable people with little capacity to pay, before charging massive interest while debt recovery processes were ongoing.