State Passes Law Excluding Collectors from Dual-Consent Recordings

Back in early March, Nevada’s General Assembly met to discuss, among other things, a bill called AB 127.

AB 127 – its individual components of letters and numbers – seems harmless enough.  The bill it represents, though?  Not so harmless, especially for the ARM and collections industry.

AB 127 allows consumers to record conversations with debt collectors without informing the debt collector that he’s being recorded.

The issue isn’t necessarily the recordings.  Collection agencies are governed by the FDCPA as to how to interact with consumers on the phone.  If you’re abusing consumers when communicating with them, you’re breaking the law and perhaps yes, someone should know about that.  The issue comes, as collection agency owner Davis Stone pointed out, with the unreliability of consumers’ recordings: “Phone call recordings are extremely unreliable, especially in this day and age, when manipulating a phone call recording is as easy as clicking a computer mouse. This gives desperate or creative debtors license to record a conversation, manipulate it, and sue the agency. The debtor is the only person who has control of the recording. They can do whatever they want with that.”

The bill passed on a 28-14 vote.