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One of the newest and more questionable practices used by collection agencies today are the use of Collection Triggers to attempt to collect on the debts that they hold.  Never heard of Collection Triggers?  Well, neither have the other thousands of individuals whose personal information is being sold by the credit reporting bureaus to collection agencies across the nation.

What Is “Collection Triggers”?

Sold under the name Collections Triggers by leading credit reporting agency Experian, this software program is designed to take the information about a collection agency’s list of collection accounts and monitor those accounts in Experian’s system for any activity on the account.  Once activity on the account has been detected, the collection agency is notified and any new contact information given to the credit reporting agency is then given to the collections agency.

This allows the collection agency to find you every time something is reported on your credit report as they now have your address, phone number, and the fact that you are paying an account or have opened a new account recently.  Regardless of whether the collection account that the agency has on you is valid or not, for as long as they wish they can access your personal information and can harass you for accounts that you may or may not owe.

Other Issues Arising

“So what?” you may say, “I don’t owe any creditors any money so this does not apply to me.”  Well, you couldn’t be more wrong.  The technology used to create Collection Triggers is already being modified to be applied to other industries. 

For example, if an individual begins the procedure to obtain a mortgage and their credit is pulled to determine whether or not they can afford the mortgage, the credit reporting agency is alerted that you are shopping for a mortgage.  The credit reporting agency then sells your information to competitors of the mortgage company you applied with so that they know that a potential customer is looking for a mortgage.  The result is that the consumer is swamped with phone calls, solicitations, and mailings that offer alternates to the mortgage company that they initially chose.

For some individuals, this competition would be welcome but many others are alarmed that their personal information would be sold to companies without their consent.  There are no conditions put into place to ensure that only reputable companies are able to obtain consumers personal information and the threat of identity theft or being signed up for programs that you did not agree to is high. 

When a company misuses a consumer’s information, which can cost the consumer a great deal of money, the burden of proving that the information was misused is on the consumer.  Even if the consumer wins their case, they still may be on the hook for hundred of dollars in charges, have negative information reported on their credit report, and there is no guarantee that the issue will not occur again if their information is sold to another company.  There is currently no way for a consumer to opt out of the system and in reality, your information has probably already been sold to any company that was willing to pay for it.