MOSCOW, January 23 - RAPSI. Court bailiffs plan to send over 8 million text messages to remind Russians of their debts in 2013, head of the Federal Bailiff Service Artur Parfyonchikov said on Wednesday.

He said that text messages are already being sent to debtors in 30 Russian regions and as a result of the experiment, debt repayment via the service's website has increased by 20%.

"We plan to send over 8 million of these messages in 2013," Parfyonchikov said at a board meeting on the service's performance last year.

He added that court bailiffs collected over 7.5 billion rubles ($248 million) of wage arrears last year.

"In 2012 we streamlined the procedure for collecting wage arrears. Thanks to the service's intervention, the payment of delayed wages increased from 69.8% in 2011 to 72.1% in 2012. In fact, 473,900 court rulings on wage arrears to the amount of 7.6 billion rubles ($252 million) were fulfilled," Parfyonchikov said.