What’s New With Florida Debt Collection Laws?

Debt is a nearly constant presence in human societies across time. Whoever said that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes could have also added debts owed to parties other than the government as one of the inevitable things in life. Meanwhile, communications media change quickly. Depending on your age, you might remember when the sign of a socially connected person was that he had a pager clipped to his jeans pocket, and whenever someone paged him, he would ostentatiously excuse himself from a social gathering and go to a payphone so that he could call the person who had paged him. If you are truly ancient, you might remember seeing black and white movies in which people received telegrams; you might have even learned Morse code so that, in the unlikely event that telegraph wires were the only functioning form of communication, you would be able to send a telegram of your own. Debt collectors quickly catch onto new communication trends, and the laws prohibiting creditor harassment take a long time to catch up to them. Earlier this year, Florida legislators passed a law giving creditors permission to email you about your debts at all hours of the day or night. If you are getting tired of all the phone calls, emails, and text messages from creditors, contact a Boca Raton debt lawyer.

It Is Perfectly Legal for Debt Collection Emails to Taunt You From Your Phone Screen When Your Anxiety Wakes You Up at 3 a.m.

The short version of the story is that creditor harassment is illegal. If you tell creditors not to contact you again about a debt, they must stop, even though this means that you still owe the debts, and it is now up to you to contact the creditor when you are ready to make a payment. Likewise, creditors cannot publicly shame you about the debt; for example, they cannot visit you at your workplace or call you at your work phone number. In 2020, after social media had spent years wreaking havoc on our interpersonal relationships and our finances, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued guidelines about social media communications from debt collectors. For example, debt collectors cannot post publicly visible messages on your social media accounts.

Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed CS/CS/SB 232 into law. One of its most painful provisions is that the prohibition against debt collection communications between 9:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m. no longer applies to email. This means that debt collectors can send you emails about your debts at any time of day or night. This would not be so bad if you still had to log into your email account on your computer to read your email. These days, even the most indebted people have smartphones, and email notifications display on the phone’s lock screen. Like everyone else you know, you often wake up in the middle of the night because you are stressed out about money, and the first thing you do is look at your phone. Thanks to the new law, you can now find debt collection emails staring back at you.

Work With a Debt Lawyer About Creditor Harassment

A South Florida debt lawyer can help you if emails from creditors are stressing you out.  Contact Nowack & Olson, PLLC in Boca Raton, Florida to discuss your case.

Source:

consumerfinancialserviceslawmonitor.com/2025/05/florida-enacts-new-debt-collection-legislation-to-account-for-modern-technologies-makes-clear-that-emails-are-not-prohibited-between-900-p-m-and-800-a-m/