ResourceBlog Article: Social Networking as A Tool for the Debt Collector (Audio Report)

contact us \| suggestion

Receive the weekly sampler of posts and "Resource of the Week".
Subscribe »

My Account »

If you find ResourceShelf useful, please supply a testimonial »

Home > ResourceBlog > Article

« All ResourceBlog Articles

Tuesday, 20th July 2010

Social Networking as A Tool for the Debt Collector (Audio Report)

From a Text Summary of the Report:

The report begins with the story of a man, asked by his employer to use Facebook to meet other people in his field.

You also need to know that he's been playing cat and mouse for more than 15 years with debt collectors. He owed the U.S. Department of Education almost $15,000 in student loans.

Within one day of placing some personal information on Facebook he received a call from the Financial Management Service, an organization that's part of the Department of the Treasury charged with finding people and collecting the money that's owed to the federal government.

Collection agencies, like everyone else, are now using social networking sites to track down or keep tabs on people they're interested in.

"It's incredible the kind of information that people put out there about themselves," says Gary Nitzkin, a credit collection attorney with his own firm, Nitzkin and Associates.

...Some of his employees go even further than just searching MySpace, LinkedIn or Facebook.

"My collectors and skip tracers will put their name in to be a friend to the debtor," he says. "And then they can get into their inner circle and talk to their other friends. Find out what they're doing. Are they going boating today — on their new sailboat? Well, guess what? We just found an asset that we can take."

And Nitzkin says that's legal.

On the surface of it, I can tell you there's nothing illegal about it.

However, others have different views and would consider this approach a legal gray area.

Access the Complete Text Summary

Listen to the Audio (Link at the Top of the Page)

Download the Transcript

Download the Audio (mp3)

Source: National Public Radio

blog comments powered by Disqus

« All ResourceBlog Articles

FreePint Family

A family of resources to help information workers be more effective, raise the value of information in their organisations and contribute to success. Read more »

Latest Family Articles:

Quilting big data threads
Thursday, 24th May 2012

Recently I have found myself cooing over visualisation maps (and heat maps) of health and well being resources. The content rich data is overlayed with mapping technologies, and some interesting themes and patterns are emerging.

The fallacy of information overload
Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

A lot of the talk around social media in the last year has been around information overload. Social media has provided us with new and exciting ways to create content. But it has also meant learning new ways to manage and engage with social media tools. Are we teetering on the edge of an information overload precipice?

Information overload: fact, fantasy or filter failure?
Wednesday, 23rd May 2012

Information overload is a figment of your imagination. Or a failure of your filter. Or a symptom of your technological submissiveness. Depends on who you ask.

Newsdesk: tracking millions of pieces of information a day
Tuesday, 22nd May 2012

What if you had to sort through 3.5 million articles and social media posts a day and try to pull out the most relevant items for your organisation? What if you then had to cobble it all together into something readable for your top groups and executives in your organisation?

Alacra Compliance adds managerial oversight
Tuesday, 22nd May 2012

Alacra Compliance saves time by aggregating information from both free and fee-based sources and enabling users to conduct an accurate federated search across these sources (coined “simultaneous search” by Alacra).

All Family Articles »
Family Articles by Category »

Tell us what you're working on,
and we'll talk to you about how FreePint can help »

FreePint Family Testimonials

"Fabulous resource to learn of unique tools and insights. Very useful." Manager, Futures and Forecasting, Virginia, USA

More testimonials »

Subscribe to the ResourceShelf Newsletter and receive the weekly sampler of posts and Resource of the Week.

Find out more »

ResourceShelf sponsored by:

Article Categories

Search News (9339)
Source File (9518)
Web 2.0 (2568)

All Article Categories »