Merlin Mitigating Collection Agency Risk With Litigant Data

KALISPELL, Mont. – Courtesy of a strategic alliance with Grand Rapids based WebRecon, Merlin Information Services today announced the release of Litigant Alert.  This offline batch service is designed to mitigate the risk of consumer rights lawsuits.

The Litigant Alert is powered by a rapidly growing database of FDCPA, FCRA, TCPA, and other consumer lawsuits filed in U.S. District Courts, as well as some state, county, and local courts. The Litigant Alert uses proprietary logic to find relevant matches to debtors by name, geography, and Social Security number.

An emerging trend finds that approximately 30% of debtors that have filed consumer litigation have filed more than one lawsuit.  As such, agencies are experiencing rapidly escalating legal costs, many of which result from frivolous lawsuits where the FDCPA has not actually been violated. 

“Collection agencies saw a 40% increase in consumer rights lawsuits in 2009,” said Merlin’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Todd Twete.  “The Litigant Alert is a tool that will help agencies identify potentially risky debtors in their portfolios.  Many of our agency customers understand that identifying these debtors proactively is key to mitigating risk and controlling expenses.”

A secondary result of the alliance is that the litigants will also be identifiable by appended Social Security numbers. WebRecon CEO, Jack Gordon, comments this is crucial to meeting the needs of the collections market. “Matching by Social Security number has been the number one demand of my customer base. We are continually innovating, but I don’t think there is a single more important thing we could have done than bringing SSNs into the mix.  Speaking as a former collection agency owner, I could have saved thousands of dollars with an easy tool like this to pre-empt repeat litigants. I wish we had something like this just 2 or 3 years ago – it would have been tremendously helpful. I am very excited to be working with an equally innovative partner in Merlin to make this extraordinary product even better.”

About Merlin
Merlin Information Services offers data solutions providing information about people, businesses, and assets.  A leader in the investigative data industry, Merlin has a reputation for superior customer service, high ethical standards, excellent data, and flexible search and retrieval software.

About WebRecon
Creditors and collection firms use WebRecon’s services to easily segregate predictably litigious consumers from their databases. A significant percentage of consumer litigation is initiated by the same consumers over and over again, and screening them out of the general population can reduce lawsuits by as much as a third.