Former debt collector reveals Australian industry’s dark secrets

Sean Letcher is a shadow of his former self.

Fifteen long years in the debt collection game, spending his days hounding people for unpaid bills and loans, left him shattered.

"In short - we are treated like slaves, like utter garbage," he says.

He has decided to speak publicly about what he saw in the private debt collection sector - and the shortcomings of a regulatory system he describes as "pitiful" and "a joke" - because he believes the average Australian would be horrified by what really goes on behind the call centre doors.

In 2012, while working for a major Australian debt collector, Letcher remembers being told to attempt to seize a home to pay down a $90,000 debt owed by a Queensland woman who had been raped in the same week her husband had died. The woman was forced to sell her home to pay the debt, he says.

The company does not have records stretching back that far and so couldn't check the allegation, but said it was committed to "treating all customers with respect and in line with the ACCC's debt collection guidelines".

Letcher says at a different debt collection company, he saw "skip tracers" - staff who track down missing debtors - create fake social media profiles to find information about their targets.