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Federal Trade Commission Shuts Down Debt Collection Scam

By Brittany Walters-Bearden, TMCnet Contributor

People in the United States have been hit by hard times in the past few years. Many Americans have found themselves unable to pay certain bills and have fallen behind on their payments. Debt collection agencies jump on this fact and use strong-arm tactics and pesky phone calls to obtain funds from people to make payments toward an overdue bill payment. Since these tactics have been happening for many years, it also allows room for bogus companies to start their own companies and then go after money to pay for bills that may not even be theirs. People often pay these debt collectors to avoid further damage to their credit, out of embarrassment, or out of frustration with the debt collectors, hoping that they will leave them alone.

It has recently been discovered that two bogus debt collection companies were opened in Florida, and they were using a call center based in India to help them perpetuate their fraudulent schemes. Fisher, Andre Keith Sanders, Pro Credit Group, LLC, and Sanders Legal Group, P.A have been shut down by the FTC (News - Alert) for collecting over $5 million from people who either did not owe the money to begin with or people who owed the money to someone else.

The Federal Trade Commission also placed a judgment of more than $25.3 against both companies for using a bogus interest rate reduction scheme for more than 18 months, beginning in January 2010. The FTC alleges that Brett Fisher, a repeat offender who settled charges with the FTC in 2009 in a scam involving both advance-fee credit cards and bogus interest-rate reduction claims, is the man who came up with these schemes.

His scam worked like this: the call center in India would use threats and abusive tactics to collect money from people who had applied for credit or received credit from an online payday loan site. The center would then use obtained information from the online site to access the unsuspecting people and launch a barrage of threatening phone calls. Once the people agreed to pay, Fisher and Sanders would use Sanders Legal Group to process the over $5 million collected through the center in India.