Fighting debt collectors for the rest of us

[haele]

18. The real problems arise when the debts are sold.

And there's a mistake, either in the identification of the person who owes, or the entity that sold the package of debts sells an out of date spreadsheet where half the people on it had paid off the debt or had been paying on the debt and it wasn't recorded properly.
The seller of the debt has no responsibility to verify the accuracy of the debt spreadsheet they are selling. They can claim any amount is owed, provide just a name and the city of the center, and the new debt collector can harass some poor schub who made a mistake back in the 1990's and co-signed on a debt that ended up in collections that s/he dutifully paid off in the early 2000's when they went after anyone associated with that bill.
Even if the paperwork is still in that person's possession, it doesn't matter if the collection company just takes the person to court in another state to ensure they get a garnishment even though the debt had been paid off 9 years earlier.
That happened to my husband with a cell phone account he had with his ex... and our joint bank account had $780 garnished a couple years ago from a court order out of New Jersey. We didn't get served until 3 days before the hearing - and we're in California!
He still has the paperwork from the previous bill collector discharging a $200 final bill he had owed MCI. It would cost us $2k initially just to get a lawyer to file an appeal in New Jersey to get the money back. Another $5k or so to sue the collector - if they're still in business.
So does my husband just take the credit hit and suck up the outright theft, or do we throw thousands more into the system now to try and get our $780 back along with the court costs - eventually. Maybe.
So, we went ahead and spent $300 to file noterize complaints to the New Jersey court that issued the ruling, the Consumer Protection Agency, and several other official licensing organizations that deal with creditors, debt collection, and businesses in general. That's all we could afford to do - and I'd guarantee that the fraudulent debt collector had made a quick Credit check on us prior to filing a claim against us to insure we weren't of the level of household income to be able to fight them in court. We were easy pickings, even if there had been a mistake made by a previous creditor and we owed nothing.

Not to mention a co-worker 's 5-year old daughter who's name was the same as someone else who was being dunned (damn spell check) a bill collector. He kept getting really nasty calls about her store card "debt" from two years before she was born, and how she was going to jail and lose everything if she didn't pay.
They just wouldn't believe she was 5 years old.
Took him three years to track down all the different credit reporting agencies and clear her credit record. He's afraid it may come back in a few years depending on whether or not the list identifying her by name only was finally scrubbed.



Haele