Word: spain
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...pictures from Semana Santa, Spain's holy week
...lenders are turning to a more direct approach to get their money back - tapping into the Spaniards' fear of public humiliation. As a result, companies offering costumed collectors who recoup debts simply by showing up at a home or office and embarrassing the debtor in question have proliferated in Spain. But their days may be numbered, now that a committee of the Spanish parliament has approved a proposal to regulate the industry, a first step to bringing an end to the tradition of collection via humiliation. (See pictures of the global financial crisis...
...Collector), began sending out agents dressed in black ties and driving cars emblazoned with the company logo. Others followed suit, in ever more extravagant getups, all of them banking on the debtor's sense of shame to motivate repayment. "Personal honor, your public image, is still very important in Spain," says José Romero of the Zorro Collectors. "If one of our agents shows up at an apartment, everyone in the building is going to know there's a debtor there...
...Apparently the tactics work. The Cobrador del Frac now has 400 employees across Spain. Its commercial director, Juan Carlos Granda, says it has a 63% success rate. And with the percentage of people who default on loans skyrocketing in Spain - it reached 3.8% in January, compared with 0.95% the year before - the number of creditors who look to its services is growing. "Thanks to the [financial] crisis, we've seen about a 20% increase in business in the past year," Granda says...
...Buddhas, Zorros, monks and chickens who populate Spain's collections community may face an enemy greater than new legislation: a changing sense of social shame. On an online forum for debtors, one writer, who goes by the moniker Altevere, wrote that he was expecting the chicken any day but was determined to meet him (or her?) sanguinely. "At first, I couldn't breathe, I thought my heart was going to burst out of my chest," he wrote. "But the next day I decided that even if they sent me all the collectors at once, I would simply ignore them...