How to stop collection agency calls in Canada - Part 5
Monty Loree: Tell our listeners what you do at your – you’re in debt settlement in Canada?
Richard Cooper: We’re a debt settlement company so we help people in financial hardship, negotiate a reduction in unsecured credit cards and loans. So it clears up the debt usually for around half of what they owe.
Monty Loree: Excellent. So people that are having trouble with their debt now, they can give you a call. It’s kind of an anti-bankruptcy or a bankruptcy alternative?
Richard Cooper: It’s a preventative step for bankruptcy. You don’t want to go bankrupt if you can avoid it. We try to help many people as we can. It doesn’t always work to fit the model so there maybe people we would suggest talk to a trustee. It’s a step you definitely want to look at before you and file for bankruptcy.
Monty Loree: Right on. Again that’s Richard Cooper from Total Debt Freedom and he’s given us some great tips on how to fool the collection agents’ dialing systems. Alright Richard, we’ll talk again soon.
How to stop collection agency calls in Canada - Part 4
Monty Loree: You’re tricking them.
Richard Cooper: I was downloading that thing you own and apparently the tone on your answering machine and play that for your greeting, it has the same effect as the telezaper and it’s free. So you don’t have to spend the money buying the device to plug in. You can just download it if you have something like Limewire or you can find the link on the internet. Put it on your answering machine and give it a try. I got it off eBay.
Monty Loree: Sounds good. Where did you get your TeleZapper? Okay, I’m sure there’s a few of them on there. That’s really good, I really appreciate that information. I’m going to post this all over my website because it’s very practical and a lot of people are going to want to hear it. Richard, just tell me your website is totaldebtfreedom.ca?
How to stop collection agency calls in Canada - Part 3
Monty Loree: Right, exactly. So basically what you’re doing is you’re fighting with fire. You’re using to combat the software or the systems – you’re using an electronic device as well.
Richard Cooper: Yes, it does work quite often. There are also anti-tricks and technology, that some of these predictive dialers have been upgraded with newer software. They can even set it so it doesn’t recognize special information. If it gets that tone, it just calls again later, hoping that maybe the TeleZapper that the consumer got doesn’t work. This TeleZapper product has sold millions upon millions in the US, so a lot of these dialing companies updated their software to try to adapt to it, skip it. It’s still a waste of resources, so they try to figure out a way of dealing with it. But it does help stop and reduce the calls in most cases. I got one for my house about three or four weeks ago. I’ve been testing on it because I use a similar sort of system. I found that a lot of telemarketing calls practically stopped. So it does work really well.
Monty Loree: Yes, can you play that tone again so people can hear it? [Tone plays] So that’s the tone that we hear, then the operator says, “We’re sorry but the number you dialed is not in service. Basically their predictive dialers are listening for that and say, “If we hear that, the number’s out of service.” So just to confirm then, once they’d hear that then predictive dialers software updates their records to say the number that we got in our database now is no longer in service. So basically, you’re tricking people.
How to stop collection agency calls in Canada - Part 2
Monty Loree: So let’s just back up a second here. So just to the average person, maybe they haven’t paid their credit card for a month or whatever and all of a sudden they get a call. They just think it’s one person calling them, but what you are saying is actually somebody’s company may have hundreds of lines that they are dialing out with and using computerized systems.
Richard Cooper: Just to make sense to hire a whole bunch of people to press buttons on the phone that dials out. So they use computer technology to do this now for the most part. Probably 90% of the calls you’ll get from collection agents are always on the predictive dialer and when it goes to collection agency, sometimes they’ll push things over to dedicated collectors. They’ll actually sit there and dial a phone and go from one file to the next file, but the majority of calls you’ll get on a collection level are usually done through a predictive dialer now.
Monty Loree: Right, so it’s also important to know that basically what happens when the bank will send all of its default accounts, I mean people that haven’t paid. They’ll send the data file over to the collection agency and then the collection agency probably just dumps it into their predictive dialer system. So it’s important that people know that this is a very automated process and it is not a very personal thing anymore.
Richard Cooper: The impression that most people have I think is there’s this army of bill collectors sitting there, hammering away on buttons on the phone trying to get them on the phone when in reality, it’s a computer. That’s why their phone can ring so relentlessly because these predictive dialers can be programmed to work in a number of ways. It’s a very sophisticated piece of machinery. The software that runs it can dial and dial and dial. If there’s no pick up, it can actually try again five minutes later, it can try twenty minutes later. They can program it to try the next day. But it’s not somebody sitting there dialing the phone. For the most part it is a computer.
Monty Loree - Richard Cooper Podcast Interview
How to Stop Collection Agency Calls in Canada
Monty Loree: Hey folks this is Monty Loree here and I’ve got Richard Cooper from Total Debt Freedom. Hey Richard, how are you?
Richard Cooper: Hey Monty. Thanks for having me on again.
Monty Loree: You wrote an article here that I put on my blog and it says, “How to Stop Collection Calls” and you’ve got a kind of an interesting angle where you’re using some mechanical devices.
Richard Cooper: Yes. I’ve done a little bit of homework on this because there are always problems with folks that are getting barraged with harassing calls from creditors and bill collectors. It actually works for telemarketers. That’s part of the scheme because all of these companies tend to use what is called a predictive dialer. I’ve got a bit of a background in the collection industry and I’ve had some exposure with the predictive dialer and the way that it works. It’s basically an outbound phone tool that’s used by most large call centers. So your collection agents, your banks, your telemarketers who’re trying to sell you windows, doors and laundry care and that sort of stuff. What they do is they basically hire one person for every three lines that they’re going to dial out because they waste a lot of resources dialing the phone not getting answers, getting answering machines not in service that sort of things. So what I found out was the way most of this predictive dialers are programmed to work is they pick up on what is called the SIT, which is a special information tone. The SIT is that tone that sounds like the number’s being disconnected. I’ll just play one for you right now I got downloaded. All that does is it basically tells the predictive dialer that the number is no good anymore. There’s something called a TeleZapper which duplicates that same tone. So what happens when you pick up the phone and the answering machine plays that tone and the predictive dialer usually determines that the number’s no longer in service and drops it from its calls list. So you don’t usually get calls after that. There’s another technique which you can adopt, which is some sort of privacy manager from the phone company which will typically tell the inbound caller once it’s an unknown number or private number that there’s something wrong with the lines; with the caller that you are trying to reach doesn’t accept the calls from an unknown number. Please state your name and we will connect you or something like that. Predictive dialers clearly can’t say their name if the call drops so it does not even ring on the other end of the phone
If you are in NF we are not licensed there so cannot assit. Check out your local phone book for some debt relief options. Make sure you do some background work on whomever you pick. Good luck.
I have $85000 in debt. Can you help with this amount? RIght now our income is cut in half as we're getting our unemployment insurance. We're covering our bills but don't have much more
