Fighting debt collectors for the rest of us

[Maraya1969]

Last edited Wed Jun 8, 2016, 12:24 AM - Edit history (2)

(I have to edit this post since someone thinks that even though I said I was a "VICTIM" that I must have deserved this abuse because I owed money. I did not owe ANY MONEY. I dealt with an unscrupulous business that signed my name to a loan. These collection calls happened about 13 years later and the first caller told me he knew I could pay because I had a trust fund. So apparently that is one of their tactics now too, going after people they think they can fool and who can pay. My credit score is over 800. I pay my damn bills but I understand very well that one of the reasons I can pay my bills is because I have been fortunate. And I know that other people have not been as fortunate and it is for these people that I write this post. These people upset, scared and fooled me and I know they do it to others. I just realized at some point that they were blowing smoke and I didn't have to bother with them)

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Here is the original post


So as one who was a victim of these people how about this.

If you end up on the phone with one of them and they start to demand payment blah blah say something like, "What are you wearing?"

And then continue on, improvising and being creative remembering that your goal is to make them cringe, in an unhappy way, the same way thing they make you cringe but along a slightly different vein.

And if they threaten you with harassment pop a bottle of champagne because you just won!

[linuxman]

1. I just try to stay out of debt and get any I have paid off quickly.

I think it was Einstein who said that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. He wasn't kidding.

Currently debt free and looking to stay that way.

You can try and fight the collectors, but anything you signed on for is legally your responsibility in the eyes of the law. They can and will garnish any income you receive, fuck up your credit, and generally make your life worse when you don't fulfill the agreed upon terms.

Granted, there are some debts that can't be foreseen or planned for, such as medical. Certain steps can be taken to minimize that, however.

I'm not under the illusion that somebody is going to swoop in and rescue me from debt, should I incur any. To plan your life around that hope, or to just ignore it in the hopes it goes away or is lost in the shuffle is foolish. With credit default swaps and the like it HAS happened, but hoping for such a rare occurrence is a fool's strategy.

[Maraya1969]

2. Did you listen to the example from John Oliver?

Medical insurance stopped with $80,000 of the bill not being paid.

Now with Obamacare that sort of thing should not happen but there are plenty of people who still are reeling because of the ruthless insurance industry.

I was a victim and I was ripped off. My credit score right now is over 800.

You do not get to have gold stars because you have not fallen victim to the many predatory practices in this country. Be grateful. Please do not point the finger.

[linuxman]

8. Literally nothing I said is at odds with your first 3 paragraphs.

I'm not asking for a gold star. I've got the satisfaction of being debt free. That's enough for me.

I haven't fallen into many of the predatory practices due to A. Luck (no medical issues, and insurance for if I do. Good insurance.), and B. Not signing up for shit I have no way of paying off before the interest eclipses the principal.

Sometimes you can very well point the finger. Not in all cases, but I have a hard time sympathizing with conspicuous consumers who bought something WAY outside their means when they didn't understand the difference between can and should. It should be obvious I'm not talking about medical debt.

[Maraya1969]

9. Please go back and re-read my OP with the edit. It just blows my mind that you cannot wrap your

head around the fact that not all people being pursued by a debt collection agency owe money!

Or even if people do owe money you cannot conceive that the debt could have been acquired illegally and immorally.

It is that "trust big companies and blame the poor" attitude that I find so vile. You assumed that I was poor and that obviously I had made some irresponsible monetary decision, (which poor people do right?) and bought something I could not pay for.

And you could not be more wrong.

[linuxman]

20. I never assumed you were poor, nor anything else about you.

You seem thoroughly committed to finding some personal offense in something I never said or did. You can do that all by your lonesome.

Why are you putting words/assumptions in my mouth. I was speaking in a general sense, not about you. Guilty consience?

Honestly, I don't really care.

[Yupster]

16. I'm the same way linuxman

Haven't borrowed any money in over 20 years - never will again.

It's just one less thing to have to worry about.

[linuxman]

21. Once you get the big stuff out of the way,

Borrowing doesn't really become that integral to your life. It's falling into the mistake of making it a habit for everything. Sometimes you have to borrow (medical, first house or car, college), but at some point you should be getting away from it. When I see people running up routine expenses on charge cards, I just sit and scratch my head. I've known people who aren't even hurting necessarily for money do it. It just becomes normal.

[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

[linuxman]

22. That sounds pretty shitty.

Occasionally it works out to your benefit. When these debts are traded and sold, often the record of debt is nothing but a name and a number. If the entity trying to collect doesn't gave the actual documentation of the debt, there is nothing they can do when challenged to discharge it. Following the financial crisis of 7-8 years ago, many of the documents and bits of information legitimizing debts were lost in the shuffle and consolidation of companies who were managing the debts. It's totaly worth looking into.

[Jim Beard]

3. I do that on unsolicited calls selling anything

[NutmegYankee]

4. I had to talk with them a bunch and I wasn't even in debt nor owed any.

The previous owner of my landline must have been in debt and debt collector after debt collector would call. They would be very abusive and accuse me of lying that it wasn't the guys number anymore. I finally took to saying some seriously fucked up things to them. I had just had enough of their filth. Eventually I out-abused them back and the calls stopped.

[WillowTree]

5. Yes, of course. Because it's the debt collector's fault that you're in debt.

[Maraya1969]

6. DID YA CATCH THE PART WHERE I SAID "VICTIM" OR DO YOU NOT UNDERSTAND THAT CONCEPT?

[WillowTree]

13. Did you catch the part where you didn't give any info about your "victimhood"?

All you said was that you were a "victim" of this debt collector. Pardon me, but my mind doesn't automatically jump to '13 years ago someone other than this debt collector must have signed Maraya's name to a loan fraudulently'. I would venture to say that in most cases, people are contacted by debt collectors because they do, in fact, owe someone money. More complete information is usually helpful if you want to be understood.

[Maraya1969]

28. Your post has been bothering me and I think I just figured out why.

If I said I was a victim of sexual assault or most any other kinds of ways people can take advantage of others I would not have to go into details to have myself be believed. It used to be that people dismissed this type of abuse all the time and if a woman said she was sexually assaulted she was made out as the guilty one. Like her clothes were too revealing or she was somehow "asking for it". That is why the concept of saying "No" at any time has been hammered into the American people's brains. So now revealing clothing cannot even enter the picture and people, for the most part accept that the assault is the fault of the perpetrator and not the victim.

But this has not happened yet when it comes to poor people. They are often blamed for their circumstance and all the myriads of factors that go in to a person's financial situation are ignored too often in favor of a "they are lazy" belief. And these debt collectors run on blaming the poor and trusting in the corporate world. Too many people believe that poor people are taking advantage of every single American taxpayer if they receive food stamps. The truth is that the big corporations, like Walmart are the, "lazy" (for lack of a better term) by making the American taxpayer subsidize their own costs for employees salaries with taxpayer paid for food stamps.



The last thing I wanted to do with that post was put anything private about myself but it turned out I had to in order to be believed. You are certainly not the only one who had the same thought about how I was the one at fault. And also the people who commented like this didn't consider that possibly the debt was an outrageous medical bill either and we know that, at least when the fight for Obamacare was on that the number 1 reason people lost their homes and all their money was for medical bills.

I am sorry for yelling at you. I know you meant no harm.

[killbotfactory]

7. It's the debt collector's fault for violating laws with impunity.

http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/06/pf/debt-collection/

[Ex Lurker]

10. I have almost no debt, and all of what I do have is current, but I still get harassed

or did, until I dropped my landline. They will call you if you have the same last name, or even a somewhat similar name, or if someone who had your phone number before you did owes money.

[Gormy Cuss]

15. ^^^This^^^^

And that's why if I were ever in a position to give them info on someone who did owe, my lips will remain sealed.

[NutmegYankee]

24. I had that problem. Previous owner of my phone number was in debt, got harrassed for months.

I consider debt collectors the lowest form of humanity.

[Mariana]

11. A couple of my mother's friends have been tricked

into paying the bills of their deceased adult children. They had not cosigned or anything like that. The collection agents told them they were responsible and had to pay it and used the usual threats and lies. These elderly ladies didn't know any better and believed they were on the hook for these bills.

When my stepdaughter got into some debt trouble the collectors called us and demanded that we pay them (we told them where they could go). That's bad enough, but imagine calling a grieving mother to scam her into paying a debt that isn't hers. I don't know how these people look in the mirror.

[Maraya1969]

12. Thank you. From my experience they lie for a living. And from reading some of the

posts here I can see how they get away with it. Some people think that if you are being harassed by debt collectors you, plain and simple, are a thief by purposely not paying your bills.

That is the way conservatives think.

[annabanana]

14. I agree. It IS the way conservatives think

(It is also the way some people are paid to operate)

[closeupready]

17. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act is strictly enforced

from what I understand - it was passed to assuage the outrage from voters over the bankster giveaway of 2005's bankruptcy reform.

Debtors should inform themselves as to the terms of that federal law, how it restricts the means by which creditors can collect debts, what they can and can't do, and provides for hefty fines in the event a creditor violates the FDCPA.

Not a lawyer, just sharing my layman knowledge of these things.

[demtenjeep]

19. my sister got into trouble and since my dad had co-signed for her they started calling my mom

this was probably 20 years ago.

they would start by asking my mom -she always answered the phone-for my dad

my mom would say he was at work

they would ask when he would be home

my mom would say -why do you need to know, he's my husband

they would carry on and my mom would start asking what the person was wearing. they would tell her none of her business and my mom would say things to the effect that she had a right to know what the person that was trying to screw her husband was wearing

now, my mama was a wonderful strong christian woman, but it was damn funny to actually hear/watch this in person

she wasn't the best educated but this was always a thing of beauty

[Maraya1969]

25. That's it! That is what I was talking about and I'm so glad to hear someone used it way before it

ever became an idea in my mind.

Your Mom must have been a hoot!

I think I put in the thing about making a deal to give them money in exchange for naked photos. If not I meant to.

[hunter]

23. I'm friendly with debt collectors. It's the worst job in the world.

Most of them would rather be doing anything else. They are only calling because they haven't found a better job yet.

The few psychopaths who actually enjoy debt collection can't get under my skin, and that seems to hurt them. I like that.

The biggest problem in the U.S.A. is medical debt and student loans, problems that don't exist in truly civilized nations. The U.S.A. is not a civilized nation.

Our family's journey into uncreditworthiness began with the expiration of an aptly named COBRA health plan and descent into uninsurability. By mere good fortune and perseverance, and acceptance to our state's high risk "insurance" pool, my wife got the medicine she needed, but not without bills we could not pay. Then I appeared in the ER with my own health crap and showed them my VISA card...

Advice: Don't bring your wallet or purse to a U.S.A. Hospital Emergency Room.

I don't have a VISA credit card anymore, just a glorified debit card. If the money is not there, the card is declined. The last time I tried to rent a car I was declined.

I don't give fuck all about credit ratings any more, so I figure I'll end up as a crazy dumpster diving street person without a phone number or forwarding address. But I'm okay with that. Been there, done that in my youth, and I can do it again. I'll simply hurt more than I used to, but THIS day I live, perhaps better than those with good credit rating who think they are well prepared for whatever the future may bring.

[Maraya1969]

26. I am really sorry you had to experience these things. Hopefully our country is

becoming more compassionate, especially for those with medical needs and you will always get your needs met from now on.

Remember things swing back and forth. I truly believe we are on a swing to a much more equal living situation in this country. We have already swung way too far backwards. And things alternate to their opposite.

[KT2000]

27. ask them if they are licensed

in your state, county and city to do business there. If not, they cannot try to collect from you. A lawyer I know has had success getting rid of harassers on behalf of his clients with this.