Website features images of muscly men and offers to target debtors’ relatives and pals
A has debt offered collection to target firm struggling Scots by sending “6ft 8in, 22st men” to their homes to confront them over unpaid bills.
Nightfox Investigations & Debt Recovery Ltd advertises online as an “old-fashioned face-to-face” debt recovery service.
Its slogans include “show your debtor who is in charge” alongside menacing photos of handcuffs and muscular skinheads.
The company also boasts that it employs “real men that get the job done” and promises to “make sure you are the first thing on your debtor’s mind in the morning and the last thing at night”.
The firm, owned by Phillip Dunn, 40, and his wife Gemma, 33, has five offices across the UK, including an investigations base in Albany Street in Edinburgh.
Dunn set up Nightfox in June 2016 after his former company, PHJ Recoveries Ltd, was dissolved in March 2015.
A Sunday Mail investigation found that the firm’ s officers were prepared to even target a debtor’ s family and friends as well as turning up at their workplace.
Scottish politicians have branded their approach “morally repugnant” while charities described their tactics as “very concerning” and “toxic”.
Night fox’s slick website attempted to drum up business by boasting: “You cannot ignore a 6ft 8in, 22st man stood in front of you. At that point, the debtor will begin to take you seriously.”
The claims appear alongside images of muscular men staring menacingly into the camera.
A Sunday Mail investigator called their Edinburgh number and was told by a woman that an employee would ring them back.
Days later, they received a call from a man who identified himself as “Dean”. After posing as an out- of-pocket landlord who was owed money by a tenant, Dean said: “What we do is we get under his skin. We get in his face. We are wherever he is.
“We bring other people into play. We bring family, friends, if we have to. Because everybody has a weak spot and it’s finding a way of manipulating it.”
Dunn, of S alter forth, Lancashire, is an armed forces veteran who started his own business after leaving the military.
The Credit Services Association (CSA), which is the trade body for debt collectors, sets general standards in the industry for the collection of unregulated debts. Nightfox is not a member.
David Stewart, Scottish Labour spokesperson for the eradication of poverty and social inequality, said :“That a debt collection agency is using its willingness to physically intimidate and psychologically bully those in debt as a selling point is utterly abhorrent. People who find