Donald A. Yarbrough (not to be confused with this Donald Yarbrough — but promise me that you’ll treat yourself to ten minutes of reading time on that guy because: wow) does not like predictive dialers. He doesn’t like their ease, convenience, or the fact that people may actually answer the phone if called by a dialer.
The second panel discussion at the FTC Debt Collection 2.0 conference dealt with telephone technologies. The primary question being discussed (as opposed to answered, because boy are these people loath to definitively say anything) is how can debt collectors use the phone — any phone, be it land-line or mobile — to contact those who owe a debt.
Yarbrough said that calling the wrong party is “a pretty big problem. Pervasive, even.” Which: okay. Sure, I think we can all agree that you’re probably never going to get an absolutely clean call-list, where every debt has the correct name attached to it. People move, change phone numbers, change last names, change first names; identity is a very portable and malleable commodity. Maybe where the challenge lies is in characterizing it as a problem in the way that Yarbrough wants to characterize it as a problem.
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