WTF, debt collectors are now allowed to harass you on social media

Just a heads up, if you buy something through our links, we may get a small share of the sale. It’s one of the ways we keep the lights on here. Click here for more.

In case debt collectors weren’t already enough of a pain in the ass, now they have an entirely new method of harassing you about your debts. A new debt collection rule has now made it okay for collectors to approach you about your debt through social media.

That friend request that you just received from that nice-looking person you don’t know? It could be a debt collector. As if there aren’t already enough social media profiles out there aiming to cause you problems, now you have to worry about if one of your debt collectors is on your friends’ list.

The new rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau does at least impose some pretty strict limitations on debt collectors’ new ability. For example, when a collector contacts you on social media, the message must be private to ensure that no one else can see it.

Additionally, individuals must make it clear that they are debt collectors. They are also required to offer you a way to immediately terminate social media communications, meaning you don’t have to continue a conversation with them if you don’t want to.

These limitations are nice and all, but it still sucks that debt collectors can now legally pester you on your social media account. Despite all of its inherent flaws, social media used to be a place where people would go and not have to worry about the struggles of daily life for a few minutes.

Look, I get it. Debt collection is part of life. These people that are cold-calling individuals and trying to get them to pay back the money they owe are just doing their job. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But do they really have to dig into our social media profiles in an attempt to get us to pay?

I don’t know about everyone else, but if I’m not capable of paying the debt that you called me about, sending me a message on social media isn’t going to magically fill my pockets.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• Does Facebook let you unlike inactive pages?
• Jack Dorsey is stepping down as Twitter’s CEO – here’s what Twitter has to say about it
• TikTok might owe you some cash for its $92 million lawsuit over data collection
• Instagram is offering creators up to $35K to post on its TikTok clone