Threats, Lies, and Nonstop Calls: When Debt Collection Becomes Harassment

Aggressive collection is a business model. A collector who scares you into paying today makes more than one who takes no for an answer. That incentive is exactly why Congress wrote the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and why the Act's most heavily litigated provisions are the ones that prohibit harassment, threats, and deception.

Harassing Conduct

15 U.S.C. § 1692d prohibits any conduct "the natural consequence of which is to harass, oppress, or abuse any person" in connection with collecting a debt. The statute lists examples, which include:

• Using or threatening violence or criminal means to harm you, your reputation, or your property
• Using obscene or profane language
• Publishing a list of people who allegedly refuse to pay their debts
• Causing a telephone to ring, or engaging any person in telephone conversation, repeatedly or continuously with intent to annoy, abuse, or harass
• Placing calls without meaningfully disclosing the caller's identity

The list is not exhaustive. The general standard — conduct whose natural consequence is to harass or abuse — catches tactics that don't fit neatly into a category.

The Seven-in-Seven Rule

For years, "repeatedly or continuously" was the subject of litigation over how many calls was too many. The CFPB's Regulation F resolved much of that uncertainty. Under 12 C.F.R. § 1006.14(b)(2), a collector is presumed to violate the harassment prohibition if, in connection with a particular debt, it:

• Places more than seven telephone calls within seven consecutive days, or
• Places a call within seven consecutive days after having a telephone conversation with you about that debt

These are presumptions, not absolute rules. A collector can try to rebut them, and a consumer can try to show harassment with fewer calls. But they give collectors and consumers a concrete benchmark, and a collector calling multiple times per day is almost certainly on the wrong side of it.

The rule counts calls placed, not just calls answered. Unanswered calls, hang-ups, and voicemails all count. Regulation F also treats calls to a single consumer about multiple debts as calls about each debt, so a collector cannot evade the limit by splitting accounts.

Inconvenient Times and Places

15 U.S.C. § 1692c(a)(1) prohibits communicating with you at any unusual time or place, or a time or place the collector knows or should know is inconvenient. Absent knowledge to the contrary, calls before 8:00 a.m. or after 9:00 p.m. in your local time are presumed inconvenient. If you tell a collector that a particular time is inconvenient — for instance, during your work hours — the collector must honor that.

Calls to your workplace are prohibited under § 1692c(a)(3) if the collector knows or has reason to know your employer prohibits such calls.

Threats and False Statements

15 U.S.C. § 1692e is the Act's catch-all against deception, and it lists sixteen specific examples. Among the most common violations:

• Threatening arrest or jail. Nonpayment of a consumer debt is not a crime. A collector who implies you could be arrested is lying.
• Threatening to sue when it has no intention of doing so. Under § 1692e(5), a collector may not threaten any action it does not intend to take or cannot legally take.
• Threatening to garnish wages or seize property without a judgment. In most cases, a collector needs a court judgment before it can garnish or levy. Implying otherwise is deceptive.
• Pretending to be a lawyer, a government agency, or a credit bureau. Sections 1692e(1), (3), and (16) all address this.
• Misstating the amount owed. Adding interest or fees not authorized by the contract, or by law, violates both § 1692e(2)(A) and § 1692f(1).
• Collecting on time-barred debt without disclosure. If the statute of limitations on the debt has run, courts have held that suing or threatening to sue is deceptive, and some have required collectors to disclose that the debt is too old to sue on.

The standard for evaluating these statements is whether they would deceive or mislead the "least sophisticated consumer." A collector cannot defend a misleading statement by arguing that a savvy person would have seen through it.

Third-Party Contact

Under 15 U.S.C. § 1692c(b), a collector generally may not communicate about your debt with anyone other than you, your spouse, your attorney, or the creditor. A collector who calls your parents, your employer, or your neighbors and discusses your debt has violated this provision. The narrow exception, under § 1692b, allows a collector to contact third parties solely to obtain your location, and even then it may not state that you owe a debt.

Documenting Harassment

Harassment cases are won on records. Start a log the first time a collector crosses a line, and record for every contact:

• Date and time
• The phone number that called and the name of the collector, if given
• What was said — as close to verbatim as you can manage, especially any threats
• Whether you told them to stop, and how they responded

Save every voicemail. Screenshot your call log. Keep every letter and envelope. If the collector contacted a third party, ask that person to write down what was said and when. California is a two-party consent state for recording calls, so check the law before recording a collector; but the collector's own recordings, which most of them make, can be obtained in litigation.

What You Can Recover

Under 15 U.S.C. § 1692k, a collector who violates the Act is liable for your actual damages — which can include emotional distress — plus statutory damages of up to $1,000 per action, plus costs and attorney's fees. California's Rosenthal Act, Cal. Civ. Code § 1788.30, adds its own statutory penalty for willful violations. A claim must be brought within one year of the violation.

The Bottom Line

The law does not permit a collector to badger, threaten, or deceive you into paying. Nonstop calls, threats of arrest, false lawsuits, and calls to your family are each violations with their own remedies. A detailed log and a saved voicemail are frequently all it takes to establish a claim.