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I worked for a company that handled private student loans for several different lenders. It was mostly inbound calls with questions about their loans, often people pretty irate that they had to pay it back so soon or payments were too high etc. It wasn’t that bad except when we had to “run the campaign” (idk why they called it that) which used an autodialer set to a certain number of attempts, as set by the lender, as attempts to get overdue payments.
The private loans in California were insane–the interest rate was so high I couldn’t believe it was legal, like 24%, and it was mostly used by med students and others who ended up with over 100k balance. They were also the toughest lender and required five calls to every borrower and cosigner for any payment over, like, a day late. We rarely got answers and the autodialer was stupid and would sometimes call three times in an hour, but they apparently couldn’t change it.
So this was in Minnesota, Central time. Once in a while we had to work 8am-noon on a Saturday if we had a lot of calls to get done. On more than one occasion, the autodialer called people in California at 8am, so 6am their time. When someone’s phone rings at 6am on a Saturday they’re more likely to answer because it’s woken them up and might be alarming to get a call that early. So people tended to answer more often. (In hindsight, this may have been intentional.) So I’d wake some poor broke kid at 6am telling them they owe $2800 and it’s affecting their credit and then calling their mom, and then it might call them two more times in an hour, even if they made a payment bc it didn’t update quickly.
The interest accrual for many of these loans was thousands a month, and once they really understood it, they often decided to just default, because it would be impossible to pay back, and I don’t blame them.
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