It is 9 in the morning on a Sunday and you receive a call from an unknown number. He picks up and on the other end of the phone someone speaks to him who tells him that he has a late payment of your bill and that if you don’t cancel it in two days your service will be disconnected.
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This call, which can be common for people who hang up with their payments, would be much more limited with the project of law ‘stop scrubbing’ that happened in Congress and all that is missing is the presidential sanction.
This project, led by the representative Juan Carlos Willsintends to protect the right to privacy of consumers by presenting the channels, hours and periodicity in which they can be contacted by the entities supervised by the Financial Superintendence and all natural and legal persons who carry out collection efforts directly, through third parties or by assignment of the obligation.
Once direct contact has been established with the consumer, the latter may not be bothered by collection managers through various channels within the same week or on more than one occasion during the same day.
What the project establishes is that collection practices must be carried out in a respectful manner and without affecting the personal or family privacy of the consumer, within the Monday through Friday from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and Saturdays from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Debtors in arrears of more than 90 days may obtain benefits in forgiveness of current interest, interest on arrears and collection expenses.
In this way, any type of contact with the consumer is excluded on Sundays and public holidays.
You will also not be able to contact personal or other references and the guarantors, co-debtors or joint debtors You will be contacted in the same condition established by law.
Stop SMS and advertising emails and calls
The provisions of this law say that commercial relations between producers and providers of private or public goods and services and the commercial consumer will be used in the same terms when sending advertising messages through SMS, application or web messaging, emails and telephone calls of a commercial or advertising nature.
The national government through Ministry of Information and Communication Technologies will coordinate with the Communications Regulation Commission the implementation of the technical measures necessary to adapt the Registry of Excluded Numbers.
When it comes to promotions to feed databases, the consumer must know and accept it in a clean way
«When a commercial transaction of goods or services is carried out, or a building or premises is entered, the consumer cannot be forced to accept receiving commercial messages of any kind, except for those matters strictly related to the good or service purchased,» says the project.
Furthermore, it indicates that when it comes to promotions to feed databases, the consumer must know and accept it in a clean way.
«The sender of the message must enable and have an agile, simple and efficient mechanism to cancel the receipt of messages and emails at any time,» he points out.