In a proposal aimed at unscrupulous debt collectors, the City Council is considering legislation that would require process servers to use global positioning systems to show that they have actually visited consumers’ homes or workplaces to deliver notices of collection proceedings.
Lawmakers hope the measure will help curb a long-running practice known in legal circles as “sewer service,” which occurs when process servers fail to serve court papers on defendants but file affidavits swearing that they did so — which allows the cases to proceed.
The victims are often debtors involved in collection suits. When they fail to show up in court they are hit with default judgments, often for thousands of dollars.
The bill would require process servers in New York City to electronically record every instance in which they serve or try to serve someone, using a global positioning system that would pinpoint their exact location.
Advocates for consumers say that sewer service has grown in recent years because of the recession and an increase in the number of collection firms that buy bad debts from credit card companies for pennies on the dollar and then seek to collect them.
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