 According to the annual CFPB 2017 report, there were 130,000 people employed by 6,000 collection agencies in the "$13.7 billion dollar industry".The debt collection industry which includes debt buyers, "in-house collection departments, third-party collection agencies, and collection attorneys", recover and return "billions of dollars in delinquent debt" to "card issuers and other creditors" annually which "increase[s] the availability of consumer credit and reduce[s] its cost.