How do you handle collection calls that come to your office from these people at ASG? It is very embarassing. Aren't they not supposed to call you at work?

[roxette]

Hi Guest,

As per the fdcpa law, you can restrict them from calling at your place of work. Please send a cease and desist letter in writing to stop calling you at your place of work. Mention in your letter that all the future contacts should be done only in writing rather than by phone. Once the collectors have received your cease and desist letter, they are required to follow it.

If they continue calling you, it will be a violation of the stated law and you can take legal actions against them.

• Keep a track of all the telephonic conversations, messages that has been left in your voicemail and all other means of correspondence.
  
• Write down the name of the employee who placed the call.
  
• Copies of all the messages that sounds harsh or abusive.

Give to your lawyer who specializes in the lawsuits of FDCPA and FCRA violations. He will file a case against the CA and you might be compensated if you win the case.

Regards
Roxette

I have had horrible experiences with this company- they have called numerous times to parents house and harrassed them. One day they asked for Mrs. XXXXX and my mom said it was her not knowing who it was, thought it was her since we have the same last name, they did not state the first name. When they started telling her what they were calling for, she asked who they were. The gentleman got all devensive and accused my mother of lying and pretending to be me and hung up. Lately i have been recieving AT LEAST 15-20 phone calls a day from "unknown" while i am at work. Sometimes 2 or 3 with in an hour period. This to me is harrassment. That is absolutly unnessicary to call that many times. Especially if you think i will be picking up the phone and actually be nice. Hell no, not after the harrasment will I even consider it. And last, at least leave who the hell you're calling for, not just a company i have never heard of.

[john]

Tink

Calling repeatedly at home or work is actually harassment and is against the federal laws. You should file your complaints at the FTC and the BBB as well as the state attorney general office.

No collection agency is allowed to call repeatedly and discuss the account with someone else other than you. Check the laws in your state and verify if you can record the phone calls secretly or you have to take the other party's permission. If you can have this recording as proof, it might add up to a legal case against the collection agency.

wow not just me, i know i owe this debt and have tried very hard to pay, but sometimes finances are tight and i have had a couple bounced payments, each time i speak to this company they seem to try to make it harder by asking for more money. I am so tired of dealing with them. but the phone calls at work, my receptionist would drop them in my voice mail and they would call right back repeatdly even if she tried to explain that i was not in the office. Then they would start calling other employees in my office that they had answered the phone before i guess thinking i was hiding, Finally had to have my boss call and tell them to stop.how can i get another company to take over my account?? i want to pay just not them.

[john]

Hi mcrowder

If you do not want to deal with the collection agency, explain the situation to your original creditor. He will pull the account from the CA and work out arrangements with you. Once everything is sorted out, the CA will stop contacting you.

get a job, and when u spend $5000 do the math. $20 a month is unacceptable and pathetic! ASG is a great company to work with if you got yourself in trouble, they can save u hundreds or thousands! Of course if you decide that ignoring the debt will make it go away, don't complain when the company that gave u the credit sues your dumb #$# for 150% more than what ASG was asking for! pay your bills! also, if you really don't plan on paying, when the collector calls, just tell them who you are, that you are a bum and will never get anywhere! Playing games doesn't work, they know what number they are calling and everyone that lives at the address. dee dee dee

I do currently work for ASG and have a few things that do stick out in my mind.
I am finding it hard to believe that all of those 15-20 Unknown calls that Tink is recieving while at work are from ASG. In general most collectors have around 300-400 accounts in their desk. It would be utterly pointless for any collector to call the residence more than once and then the place of employment if no one answered at the residence as it would put them severly behind in work and probably get them tossed out for the reasoning behind being so far back in work. Not only that but our calls are monitored and if they do catch us doing that they will take discipilary action. We have an actual Quality Assurance dept that tries to monitor collectors performance and to make sure they do comply with fdcpa. I admit that there are a few bad collectors but that comes with any job, eventually they will be caught and delt with, its just slightly hard for our QA dept to listen to every call all of our hundreds or reps make.
I understand that most of the people that are posting here honestly are upset with getting calls for people that arnt them or dont live there anymore but you have to understand where we come from. We talk to hundreds of people everyday, most of them really are deadbeats, who tell us we have the wrong number or the person we are calling for doesnt live there anymore. After awhile believing what the person says on the other end of the line becomes something you dont do very often. So when you do speak to a collector in an irritated tone or you yell at them then they generally will think that you are lying. We do have tools to verify phone numbers but they dont always provide info for everynumber but if the number is still under someone with the same last name then it becomes even more unbelievable that you dont know them. If they keep calling then fax or mail a letter stating that the number doesnt belong to them anymore or they dont live there. Hopefully it shouldnt come to that often, I'd prefer it didnt happen because it really does just stress out both parties involved and waste everyones time because of the calls.
As for dealing with the original creditor, it really depends on who the creditor is, if its CapOne, they wont bother, they actually redirect your call right to us. And as for mcrowder, they probably are asking for more money because of the fact you did bounce payments. At that point we wont trust the fact that you ahve the ability to get the money in and would rather to deal with larger sums at that point to A)get the account out of our office and B)keep your account from staying here long enough to become even larger with more interest and make you shy away at the growing balance. You might be tired with dealing with us but im sure we are becoming sick of bounced payments. Bouncing it does just make you look bad and that you are trying to hide from it by giving us a bone and running away from it. You might not be doing that but honestly thats what it would look like to pretty much any collector.
To the concerns about payments not being enough, the minimum payments are determined by our clients standards, if we tell you a certain ammount of money isnt enough then its because our client told us that its not enough. Sure you can send it in and it will be taken off your balance but it doesnt count as an actual payment on the account since it doesnt meet the minimum for a payment in our client's view. I suppose a "payment" in this sense is generally just used as a term for an ammount showing that you are trying to meet the clients standards of paying this back, obviously sending money in is a form of payment but not in the sense I mean (that might be confusing but its the best way i can word it).
If you dont want a call from work then tell us. We WILL note it and wont call it again.
I saw Pam mention on the other page about a collector suggesting that she should file for bankrupcy. That is probably one of the claims that I generally find extremly hard to believe as a collector would get absolutly nothing out of this, if the customer files for bankrupcy then the collector will personally never see any of the money collected. And as for having medical issues keeping you from paying it is another thing that we are told from many people who honestly dont have intentions of paying. Everything from "I cant work anymore" to "I'm dying" to "I lost all of my limbs (honestly heard that...more than once)".
As for what Jeevz said about trying to collect on an account that was in good standing, it was most likely the creditors fault. When they send thousands of accounts to us every so often they have been know to do everything from screw up the balances to sending us accounts that were already settled to sending us accounts that should have already been taken care of due to fraud(had three of those yesterday). If its in our computers then the client sent it to us to collect.
As for "contacting" family members or friends no information is ever given other than our name and company name, we never divulge any other information and if asked we say that we cannot speak to them about the matter, just that we are looking for that person.
As for the comment a guest made about telling the collector they reserve the right to record the call, if its ASG the collector probably wouldnt have a problem seeing as how they are already being recorded by QA to begin with.
Our company does have a lot of more harsh standards than the FDCPA as well which new hires from other companys often scoff at and then proceed to get tossed out because they didnt follow them.
I do understand that there are a lot of people out there who honestly cant help the situation they are in and for the most part my coworkers understand that, for the most part we are just doing our job and following the standards our clients give us. We would rather work with customers to fix the debt rather than argue with them, there are just sometimes that situations and attitudes on both sides do clash but those are generally isolated at this company.

I have never dealt with a polite person from ASG EVER. As for collectorjim, your intentions are good, but most of it is a load of crap. Maybe YOU should listen in on some of your coworkers. My in-laws were harrassed repeatedly by your company, until my father in law got an attorney, because your company WAS asked not to call him anymore, and DID continue to call repeatedly, at least twice a day, EVEN AFTER he spoke to someone on the phone, and EVEN AFTER I had already contacted your company myself and told you not to call him...you HAD my info and chose not to use it for some reason. I NEVER got calls from you, ONLY my father in law did, WHY??? Lawyer and cease and desist letter did work, so there is no use in just telling them not to call, they will not listen.

[CycloneFan]

I have dealt with ASG for a while and have not really had any problems with them. Once I set up payment arrangements on my account they have been very nice to me. They have worked with me.

To Guest:
If we never called you and only called your father in law then most likely it was because the primary number we recieved from the client you owed for some reason was your father-in-law's. As a general rule of thumb we generally dont remove primaries just because we are told the person doesnt live there unless we have valid proof or reason to believe it to be true. Your father-in-law probably told whoever called that he wouldnt give a proper number leading whoever was taking care of the account to believe that he was just hiding you. No, third parties dont have to give any information in the least, but when you have a primary that says they wont give an updated number or any other information will just lead any collector in the world to believe that that person is just screening for the debtor and reason to believe it is the proper number. And obviously you never dealt with any polite person from ASG as you just said yourself we "NEVER" called you. If we did have your info we would have as every account in the system gets forced through our auto-dialer atleast probably twice or three times a month and every single number on the account gets called. The only times anyone in the company would call the same number more than once is if there wasnt an answer in the morning and its night time, the number was busy, or we were asked to call again. The system goes over everynumber thats called more than once and makes a list and QA verifies and if someones calling those numbers more than once to harass someone, then disciplinary actions occur. There is quite simply no way for us not to have your info and you not get a call. With some clients we even recieve every single number you called them from and those are even all called.

You apparently did not read my post collectorjim..YOU HAD MY PHONE NUMBER. And no, you never called me, but I DID CALL YOU, and no I never did deal with a polite person.

By the way, I have NEVER used my father in laws number as a primary number, I have never lived with him.

I did read your post, and as I said if we had your number its impossible for us not to have called it as it gets autodialed by the computer like every other account, theres no need to get highly defensive, I'm just pointing out a fact of how things work there. And as I said before, while you may not have put it as a primary it may have been the primary given to us by the client as they have been known to screw things up from time to time (especially if it was thrown to another agency and retracted and sent to us) as I've said previously, I never said you personally listed it as a primary. I'm not getting into an argument with you over what you say happened as each situation is different, I'm just stating the facts that happens for every account that comes to the office and possible reasons as to why everything happened. Theres no reason for hostility.

I receieved a "validation notice" from Account Solutions Group approximatley 2 weeks ago. It was about an old credit card debt that I had neglected due to some medical issues. Needless to say I was very hesitant to contact them after reading the remarks from this forum. To make things worse the notorious Phil had left numerous messages on both my cell phone and home phone... I am of a different state of mind than many of the people in this forum. I understanf that I owe the money, it doesn't anger me that I am getting phone calls about it, I was actually happy that was the extent of it. I suffered a hardhship and was unable to pay for sometime, when i started get back on my feet I was in a deep hole and I dreaded having to explain that to someone. I called anyway and was transferred to this gentleman Phil. I remebered the previous post and immediatly became very defensive expecting the worst. Phil was more than helpful. He was a great listener, he explained to me exactly what had happened to the card and discussed the difference between settling the account or paying it in full. He also explained to me the trap that is credit councelling centers. I will have the bill payed in full by the end of next month. This Phil was the polar opposite to the one described previously. At the end of the conversation he told me he was the only Phil in the office and if anything came up to call him directly??? I was worried about calling ASG due the remarks of this forum and I was completely mislead. I feel that if you are honest and forthcoming with these people only good will come of it, whether you pay or not, I am sure that if there was a forum for collectors to tell horror stories about their "debtors" it would be a much longer forum than this, I bet Kathleens run in with Phil might sound a litle different.