Companies like Encore often schedule dozens of payments and make dozens of calls before the loan is paid off.

Encore  which also operates as Midland Capital Management  also files sheaves of lawsuits against customers who do not respond. Sometimes the debt is so old that the statute of limitations for filing a suit has passed, and it may already have vanished from a person’s credit report. If the debtor makes a new payment, though, the statute of limitations starts all over again.

Image The Encore Capital Group, a debt collection company based in San Diego, has pep talks for workers at its call center in India. Credit... Zack Canepari for The New York Times

Credit counselors in the United States say more and more of their clients are being contacted by debt collectors based in India. Sometimes, it can cause problems. When clients “run into someone who doesn’t speak English well or there is a communication gap, it can add to the frustration of the customer,” said Bill Druliner, manager and financial counselor for GreenPath Debt Solutions in Milwaukee.

Debt collection, no matter who does it, can have “a devastating impact on people’s lives,” Mr. Druliner said, because calls can stress family relationships and sometimes debtors are pressed into paying late bills instead of buying necessities like prescriptions. Still, he said, he had not run into any specific problems with overseas debt collectors. “What they may lack in authority or ability to handle slang, they do handle the process very well and are very well spoken,” he said.

Mortgage loans, which involve complex state and national laws, are nearly always handled by collectors in the United States. But credit card, auto and other debt are prime candidates for collection overseas.

Just over 4.5 percent of all bank credit card accounts were delinquent in the fourth quarter of 2007, according to the Federal Reserve, up from 3.5 percent two years before. Businesses in the United States put $141 billion in delinquent consumer debt up for collection in 2005, according to a PriceWaterhouseCoopers survey commissioned by an industry group, and debt collection agencies collected $51 billion that year. They kept nearly a quarter of that in profits.