Daily Digest – November 18. Congress Pushes For Robocall Recall; Debt Resolve Posts Quarterly Results

Some quick links to start your Wednesday. Car-sharing company Uber is offering free flu shots at your home or office in three dozen cities nationwide tomorrow …  What your salary says about you … Citrix is spinning off its GoTo business, including GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar, and laying off 1,000 employees … A hacker recreated the fingerprints of the German defense minister using high-resolution photos of her hands … The CFPB’s complaint database is “riddled” with errors, including one complaint that was recorded as 35 different ones … Amazon will offer Black Friday deals every five minutes … Morning raids in Paris left two dead and seven arrested as authorities targeted those behind last week’s terrorist attacks … Eight ways to boost your confidence … How to clear out space on your iPhone “super-fast” … The coolest offices of 2015 … That Charlie Sheen has HIV shouldn’t come as a surprise, but the fact that he spent $10 million trying to keep it secret was pretty interesting.

NEWS 

• Because proposed legislation wasn’t a strong enough statement against allowing the use of robocalls in collecting government-backed student loans, 41 Senators and members of Congress — all Democrats — wrote a letter yesterday to the chairman of the FCC, urging the agency to take steps to limit the allowance of automated dialing technology in collection calls. Allowing robocalls violates a “zone of privacy” that consumers have been afforded under current laws and regulations, the members of Congress wrote.

• This is a case we talked about yesterday on our TCPA update webinar – a full article will be posted shortly. A Pennsylvania man received 28,000 text messages from Yahoo because the previous owner of the cell phone number had set up an alert to receive a text message every time an email was received. With a penalty of $1,500 a pop for each text message, the case has the potential to set a very large precedent for the collections industry. Yahoo would not let the man turn off the text messages because it said he was not the account holder of the email address attached to the phone number.

• Debt Resolve posted its third quarter financial statements. The company recorded $2.2 million in revenue, 56% higher than the second quarter – which, at the time was the company’s best quarter ever – and $520,673 in operating income, also beating last quarter’s record.

• A professor and author of a report about the unintended consequences of debt collection reform has written an article further explaining his position in anticipation of the CFPB’s proposed debt collection rule. “While the debt collection process is certainly not a pleasant experience, the worst practices of the industry’s past have generally been outlawed,” he wrote.

I guess it’s that time of year again

Leadership wisdom from The Jedi

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