Posted on 08/23/2006 12:35:53 PM PDT by Brytani
With all the recent news stories of debt collectors landing in prison or being taken out of business for illegal and strong arm tactics, I thought i'd share with my fellow Freepers a great resource to help if you ever have to deal with a scumbag debt collector.
http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs27-debtcoll.htm
This link has resources to use if dealing with collection agencies/collectors, your rights, links to the FTC, sample letters and more.
I hope this is helpful to some Freepers who've been hounded rightly or wrongly by this pretty much unregulated billion dollar a year industry.
=)
You tell'em KoRn.
That is ridiculous. However, as a lawyer who has done some plaintiff's collections work, I can tell you that at least 80% of these people REALLY ARE deadbeats of the worst kind. (My worst case ... my client spent 2 years pursuing a simple $1000 unpaid consumer bill before he hired me...and then saw the guy driving a brand new Lexis around town.) This does not excuse the behavior of the collection agencies, but it does explain why they are so cynical and impatient.
That's true, plus if you make a payment on an outstanding debt, you basically restart the clock allowing them to keep reporting the bad debt for 7 more years.
Our problems haven't been our debts, except for medical crap that nobody ever gets right. Our problems usually end up being someone with the same name as my husband ending up on our report or collection agencies calling us looking for the other person.
I swear I'm going to make him change his name.....
A creditor is not allowed to delete an accurate credit listing, even if it is subsequently paid. It can be shown as paid, but it should not be deleted, unless it should never have been posted.
That is true. Two years ago I went to a local emergency room and was billed, as was my insurance. The insurance company sent my form showing how much the hospital charged, how much was allowed under their contract with the hospital, and how much I owed.
The form stated that for no reason was I to pay the difference between what the hospital charged and the amount the insurer and the hospital had agreed, which amounted to something like $73.00
I paid my portion and thought that was that.
I then got a bill from the hospital which demanded immediate payment of the $73.00. I wrote back that I didn't owe it and to take it up with the insurance company.
Next month I got a call from a collection agency. Some weasel making threats and snarling on the other end of the phone is always greeted with a rude remark and a hangup by me. I told him the situation and hung up.
A few months later, I checked my credit report. There is was: two or three lines that confirmed my dead beatness to the world. The collector had reported my delinquency, all $73.00 of it. Fuming, I gathered my insurance docs and hospital bills and started doing the math, all ready to sue the SOBs.
That's when I found MY error. Because of deficient math skills, I had underestimated what I owed to hospital by........$73.00. I had paid them almost $300, but came up $73.00 short. Of course, I felt like an idiot.
I wrote the hospital a check the next day. I wasn't a dead beat or a bad credit risk, far from it. But, I had made an honest mistake.
Dang. This turned into a long post.
I'm venture a guess it's more like 90% are deadbeats.
I fully agree, if you owe a bill, you pay it, or make arrangements to pay it and keep those arrangements. However, when you don't owe a bill, there is a billing mistake etc people shouldn't be hounded by collection agencies.
Collections is a billion dollar industry that's basically unregulated even with state and federal consumer protections. The tactics used by debt buyers (scum of the earth IMO) are really bad and rarely is anything done against them.
Plus, when a company can purchase a debt, have access to everyones credit reports, can put the debt on someones report without verification it's a legitimately owed debt or even the right person, I've got a BIG problem with that.
It seems that we're getting to the point in this country when you won't be able to walk into a store to make a cash purchase without someone running your credit report. I'd love to see more protections for consumers when it comes to who can access and/or place information on credit reports.
There is no such thing as an honest mistake to a collection agency.
One month after my I came home form the hospital with my new baby I received a bill from the hospital claiming my insurance company had refused the claim 10 days before. The hospital rfused to show me the paper work from the insurance company, and so I called the company to ask why the claim was denied --- my claim was not denied........the company had not been billed when the hosital claimed it was. In fact the day I got the bill from the hospital was the same day the insurance company received it from the hospital.
It is not always the collection agency's fault..........in this case the particular hospital had a notorious reputation for doing that kind of stuff.
Did you explain to the hospital that you'd made an honest mistake and ask them to remove the account from the collection agency and have the negative information taken off of your report?
Most of the time, especially with medical bills, if it's an honest mistake or an insurance screw up, they will remove it for you.
I've read news stories about people's cats and dogs being approved for credit cards!!!
Is criticism an unwelcome thing on FR now?
Are you sure they would remove it? The information they had was correct. I was way behind on the $73.00.
It was not a mistake by them, so I don't think they can remove it.
( No more Olmert! No more Kadima! No more Oslo!)
Good luck.
"It really bugs my ass when prissy posters point out the grammatical flaws of others."
It really bugs my ass when somebody calls a spelling error a grammar flaw. ;-)
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