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Hanna, a middle-aged wife and mother, is trapped inside her North Jakarta home. Outside in the house’s parking garage are two luxury sedans, one of which is just over a month old.

Waiting in the wings are three stocky, heavy-jowled men, with combed over hair and shirts neatly tucked into their tailored trousers.

They have been knocking on Hanna’s front gate since daybreak six hours ago. Only in the last few hours, the men haven’t been knocking but pounding, using the large padlock hanging from the gate.

Convinced Hanna and her teenage son are hiding inside, they have also been shouting for them to come out.

While the men do not use expletives or make threats, their demands are loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

The men are debt collectors, used by banks and other money lenders as a last resort.

For the last six or seven months, Hanna (not her real name) has paid the price of her husband’s massive debts with shame and isolation.

All of her neighbors and relatives now know about her family’s financial situation. Not only because the debt collectors have been sending out the message loud and clear for the last three days in front of her house, but also because they have been making phone calls to almost everyone Hanna and her family know, informing them of their “situation.”

Ferdi (not his real name) is a debt collection officer for an international bank in the Sudirman area of Jakarta.

His job involves sitting at his desk making phone calls to clients who are more than six months late on their payments. It is his men who were waiting for Hanna and her husband to pay up, and since they were not authorized to enter private property, Ferdi had to work out an aboveboard debt-collection strategy.

The men carry with them legal papers that allow them to stand outside the debtor’s residence. So Ferdi devised a plan: “Go to the closest market and get a set of thick chains,” he told his men. “And seal her gate with it.”

For the next two days, Hanna and her son were prisoners in their own home, unable to leave the house for errands or even school.

“After little more than a day of being trapped, she apparently called her husband [in hiding], and he called us,” Ferdi said. “He ended up paying.”

Ferdi said the clients he phoned were often on the defensive, so he uses a crisply polite tone of voice at first. “But if they keep avoiding or rejecting me, or if they start becoming difficult to deal with — such as refusing to pay or calling us names — then I step it up a notch.”

He said the debt collectors issued veiled threats, “something like ‘so your son goes to school here right? And your wife works here, right?’ ”

John (not his real name), a debt collector working for a South Jakarta branch of one the country’s largest banks, said he preferred not to make threats.

“It’s taxing sometimes, when you get aggressive customers, but you stay as calm as you can,” he said.

Ferdi said that his men never used violence, and that physical contact was not permissible under either banking regulations or the law.

“I’ve had my men standing guard in front of a customer’s son’s school, just for show. That forced the school to confront [the father], because the other parents were frightened,” he said.

John, who deals with people who are usually in less serious debt than Ferdi’s, said he sympathized with his colleague.

“Because the later the customer is [in paying their debts], chances are they will need a harder push,” he said.

John took out the debt collection guidelines from his desk drawer and began to read aloud.

One of the guidelines — “Do not act rude and resort to the zoo” – refers to not calling people names like dog, pig or rat. “Sometimes that’s hard not to do,” he said.

According to Ferdi and John, the debt collectors who man the phones for banks are generally divided into four categories: “Current,” for officers responsible for giving customers a reminder several days before their payments are due; “X-day,” for officers who deal with clients who are between one and 30 days overdue; “Recovery,” for officers dealing with clients who are more than a month late paying; and “Hard core,” for officers who handle clients who are more than two months behind in their bills.

Ferdi said with a laugh, “I’m at the tail end of the ‘hard-core’ section. That’s why I need tougher [debt collection] guys.”

Boris (not his real name) is an official debt collector for the Kuningan branch of another high-profile national bank.

Just like Ferdi’s men, he physically approaches clients who have missed their payment deadlines.

Other than his sheer bulk, the Batak man, who says he is “somewhere in my mid-20s,” does not look threatening, at least not until he begins to recount some of his experiences. Then his brow furrows, his jaw clenches and he squares off in a boxing stance.

Boris explained: “If the customers are nice, we’re nice too. But if they are emotional, then we become ‘emotional.’ ”

Boris said some clients managed to turn the tables on the debt collectors.

“[One of them], I don’t know how he did it, but he got a whole bunch of people from his neighborhood. And all of them beat me up,” he said.

Deni is a debt collector for the same bank as Boris. The mild-mannered Javanese man is almost 10 years older than his colleague.

He said his most memorable experience was “when a customer in Pondok Indah wouldn’t let me into his house even though I had the right, so I climbed the gate. Before I realized it, a bodyguard was pointing a gun at my head.”

Deni said the customer, who was Rp 100 million [$10,000] in debt, came into the bank the next day to settle his debt.

But Deni said he seldom resorted to anything too extreme.

“I always try to connect with [customers] heart to heart. I believe this is the most effective way.

“If that doesn’t work, you keep on calling their cellular phone and their home. Then you begin faxing letters to their office,” Deni said.

Donna (not her real name) was one of Deni’s “customers,” and remembers him well. She owed the bank he works for “around Rp 20 million for seven months.”

Donna said that after a few days of managing to dodge the bank’s calls, she spotted Deni in front of her house one day.

“I was driving home from grocery shopping and saw them [debt collectors, including Deni] in the driveway. I tried to turn the car around, but they’d seen me — it was too late.”

Donna said was terrified. “You don’t think logically, and you think they are allowed to kill you or hurt you.”

That same day, she went to a friend’s home — accompanied by Deni — who lent her the money to pay the debt. “My friend felt sorry for me,” she said.

Ferdi said that he had become immune to the heart-tugging and wheedling of clients.

“It’s a guy with a failed business plan, a con victim or someone claiming the global financial crisis affected them — before the crisis even happened,” he said.

Deni said it only made things worse for a client if they retaliated.

“We’ve had customers send fake lawyers to our building with ludicrous claims,” he said. “That’s just asking for trouble.”

Ferdi’s aforementioned chain trick at Hanna’s house prompted the family to protest through various national newspapers. But Ferdi says he at no stage broke the law, adding that the phone records are proof he never crossed the line when dealing with the family.

Still, Ferdi, Deni, John and Boris distance themselves from the loan sharks who operated in the city. Ferdi said that “their methods are despicable and inhuman.”

He produced the number of an “acquaintance” — a loan shark, more commonly known as a rentenir , which derives from the Dutch word for lender.

The loan shark, Budi (not his real name), only agreed to a phone interview

“I don’t care” was his standard response to questions both about his debt-collection strategies and the well-being of his clients.

“They want money?” Budi said. “I give them money. If they don’t pay on time, it’s their fault,” he said, before hanging up.

Ferdi explained that loan sharks lent money with “ludicrous interest rates” and that they resorted to violence “like it’s going out of fashion.”

Ferdi, John and Boris view debt collecting as a stepping-stone to a better future, while Deni is in it for the long haul.

John, a fresh graduate, said his monthly salary was Rp 1.1 million, while Deni said he used to make up to Rp 10 million a month, but lately it had gone down to Rp 5 million to Rp 6 million.

Boris said he sometimes felt like it wasn’t worth it “when my life is at stake every day.”

Ferdi concluded: “It’s an exciting way to make a living, and you have stories to tell. But it changes you.”