A woman driver - Joanne - has recounted her story of how she felt "stalked" by an Australian Recoveries & Collections debt collector who tracked her down like a blood hound and phoned her on her work phone and on her personal mobile phone. The reason why this has made this news page is two fold:
1. Both the car park company (which I won't name) and the debt collection company (ARC) knew the woman's address so should have written to her instead of phoning her.
2. The woman had already paid the fine well before they tracked her down in this manner. So they had no right or reason to be phoning her.
Joanne received a parking fine on her windscreen. She didn't know why as she had purchased a ticket and placed it on her dashboard. She phoned the parking company who asked her for her name and address and then said they were rejecting her appeal and said she had to pay the fine. They posted a letter out to her home address with a payment demand. She had 28 days in which to pay.
However unbeknown to Joanne, before the 28 days was up an Australian Recoveries and Collections employee went and obtained the name and address of the owner of the car (the car belonged to a friend of Joanne's) and sent her friend a letter demanding payment. When her friend notified Joanne, Joanne immediately sent an email to the car park owner (obtaining his email address from my website). The owner never replied. But about half an hour after she sent the email, her work phone rang and a person by the name of Andrew from Australian Recoveries and Collections spoke to her. She hung up in disgust. Then a few seconds later, her mobile phone started ringing, with a "private" number and she decided not to answer it. The person tried her mobile 3 more times.
When Joanne contacted me, I did a google of her name and her work number turned up in the search results as her name and phone number is on the website of the company that she works for. So this man Andrew googled her, obtained her work phone number and rang her. He's also obtained her mobile number and rung it too. We then both went to the website of the Parking Company and found on its FAQ page that "all appeals and communication must be in writing" and the parking company "will respond in writing". So why was this Andrew man ringing her? They had her postal address so they should have written to her, not rung her. It might have been less culpable had she given them her work number and they had then rung her there. But she hadn't provided them her work number, because she didn't want them calling her at work. Debt collection laws state that debt collectors should always use the least intrusive method of contact. In general this means that the contact should be in writing. The only exception to this is if the person has not responded to the written contact. However, Joanne had in fact responded, so it wasn't as if she was avoiding her obligations at all. But it gets worse still. Debt collectors can only trace your personal details if you are alleged to owe money to someone. Joanne had paid her parking fine of $66.00 days earlier, so she owed no money. This was a gross invasion of her privacy. She sent an email to the owner of the parking company explaining how she felt and never got a response.