When Tobias "Bags of Money" Boyland went looking for a new career after serving 13 years in prison for armed robbery and drug dealing, he quickly found something that suited his sensibilities: He opened a collection agency.

It was, in some ways, a natural move for a young man in Buffalo. Desperate for jobs, this chronically depressed Rust Belt city has become home to one of the biggest concentrations of debt collection businesses in the U.S.

"Collections is the Bethlehem Steel of Buffalo," said Boyland, 44, recalling the industrial giant that once employed 20,000 people in the region. "You can make a decent living in a town where there isn't a lot of opportunity."

Between 5,000 and 6,000 people earning $30,000 to $40,000 a year now work at roughly 110 collection agencies in and around Buffalo, an industry created with the help of seed money from the state of New York. The industry has been a rare economic bright spot in Buffalo, the nation's third-poorest city of its size, a place where 30 percent of the people live in poverty.

Yet, law enforcement and consumer groups point to a dark side: Buffalo, they say, has also become a center for some of the worst elements in the business. Debt collectors, some of them convicted felons, have illegally posed as lawyers or unlawfully browbeat people _ threatening to have them arrested or stripped of custody of their children _ to scare them into making payments.

"Get some clean clothes because you're not coming home any time soon," one debtor was told.

As the sour economy leaves people less and less able to pay their debts, the collection abuses have become so flagrant and numerous that state and federal authorities have moved to shut down several Buffalo-area agencies where the most heartless and bullying telephone calls originated. At least 20 people have been sued or arrested on criminal charges.

Boyland himself was forced out of business and jailed in June after authorities said they caught him carrying a loaded, unlicensed pistol as they investigated more than 1,000 complaints about abusive tactics at his collection business.

The regional Better Business Bureau said that in the past three years, it has gotten 4,562 complaints about debt collection agencies in western New York. Of 213 agencies it has graded in the region, 104 were given an "F." And of all the complaints about debt collection received by the Better Business Bureau nationwide last year, about 1 in 10 involved a company in western New York.