It's a legitimate need, it's just a corrupted industry because of misaligned incentives. We need some form of debt collections otherwise credit couldn't exist. The problem is that regulations are absolutely inconsistent and don't incentivize people to operate ethically. It's a regulatory problem.

An interesting fact is that a lot of agencies buy debt for about 1 cent on the dollar and liquidate around 2%. Collecting debt is actually very hard and the success rates are super low.