Which Better Business Bureau Offices Get the Most Debt Collection Complaints?

As a part of our Complaints Issue, brought to you by Persolvo Data Systems, I recently posted an article titled “Most Collection Agencies Receive Only One Complaint per Month,” which included statistics about the 14,266 debt collection complaint data records we received via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for January 2012.

The article noted that there are five primary sources of FTC complaint data.

This post covers statistics specifically regarding complaints submitted to the FTC by the Better Business Bureau (BBB).

We analyzed two of the four weeks’ worth of data we received (January 1-15, 2012) to produce this information, which included a total of 942 records submitted by 78 separate BBB offices.  Complaints were logged against 481 separate companies, averaging just under two complaints per company.  There was some overlap across offices of “complained about” companies, which accounts for the difference between the total of 516 referenced below, and 481.

Also of note is that FTC complaint data includes additional fields “Complaint Info Law Violation Description” and “Complaint Info Statute Description.”  The BBB data contains none of this information.

insideARM.com has published a FREE report that really dives into the BBB complaint process. We interviewed several debt collection agencies that are intimately involved with their local BBB office, as well as representatives of the BBB. To learn more about it, read this post, or – if you are a registered user of insideARM.com and currently logged in – download it now.

Here are the numbers from BBB offices across the country: