The Correct Way to Handle Collection Calls and Illegal Tactics

I think Lone Star just got a new Thesaurus.

Gloria, call the bullying collector if you like, but be ready with the $5.54 fee to follow on paper, perhaps mentioning in your cease-comm notice that you've been pelted with calls and include a list of dates and times. State on whatever date and time you chatted with a rep named Whoosie Whatsis and revoked further call permission. Then your record matches theirs, if they bother to maintain one, not that they will gladly give it up in legal discovery. Your payoff for the extra effort? Depending on what was said to you and the calling pattern, you might already have a FDCPA case.

Your issue is precisely what my advice to Dee five days ago is set to avoid. You've been diligent with complaints; don't forget to tip off the FTC. But again, you personally cannot prove a cease-comm or any other demand made verbally was received by a collector. Even a clean time-stamped audio recording made and kept by you, while of value for many reasons, may not be admitted by a judge or arbitrator. Faxes and emails are closer to hard print but considered too easy to falsify. A mint green USPS return card in your hand marked as received makes it nigh impossible for an offending collection agency to feign ignorance and wriggle away.

A little lecture now on the topic of steering collections contact away from the phone and other electronic channels ....

In physical self defense training one is taught to first disarm an opponent wielding a non-range weapon such as a knife or a club. The debt collector's primary weapon is the telephone. The sooner you knock it from her hand the less painful the fight becomes. Removing the exchange to a paper trail means in part that you get to slow the process and expand your reaction time. You take control which you badly need away from the collector.

This may mean unlearning a behavior first taught in the twentieth century, a belief that everything in creation can and should be done with a voice call. Nothing you do pre-litigation is going to scare an agency quite like a #10 envelope festooned in green labels and a USPS bar code. Even before the letter opener starts cutting, it says you will not be a typical pushover, that you are as serious as cardiac arrest about defending your rights.

Calling everyone and the neighbor's dog for purported skip tracing purposes is arguably the practice which draws the most complaints against the collection industry overall. Collectors will always start with whatever contact data is attached to an account, but may branch out to relatives, neighbors, workplaces, or anyone they think could help. Strictly from an efficiency and investigatory standpoint, this makes sense. The usual problem is that collection reps are trained to disbelieve anything they are told which thwarts payment. You must understand that collections is a meat grinder business wherein a single rep might work accounts by the dozen every hour. Reps are paid to seize assets, not behave like librarians. The bad collectors don't need much for an excuse to call, and they don't much care whose name is on the settlement checks they want.

The FDCPA unfortunately aids this abuse. Collectors get one contact only with a third party to "obtain location", unless it's thought that contact yielded incomplete or faulty information on an alleged debtor. Guess who gets to decide that your responses were unsatisfactory? The Act was first drafted in a time before pagers, mobile phones, public internet access, and also the computer databases collectors routinely strafe for consumer intel, such as Chex Systems, ChoicePoint, the credit bureaus, et al. Let's not forget those "cloud" repositories of voluntary security breaches, such as Facebook and MyUselessNavelGazerBlog-dot-lint. A growing sentiment holds that traditional "skip tracing" is on its way to obsolescence, and far too many abuses occur in the guise of "locating" people who are already found.

The collection lobby ACA has been arguing and flacking for months ahead of the new CFPB assuming power in two weeks, whining about the FDCPA needing an update to "improve communication" with alleged debtors. Linked below is the press release from early April:

http://www.insidearm.com/daily/debt-collectio ... tection-bureau/

Note the chiseled language about communication "methods the consumer identifies as convenient". Under the FDCPA, any time or method of contact deemed "inconvenient" by a person becomes off-limits. Calls to a known mobile phone are also in violation, as are any contacts which incur cost. Right now what constitutes abuse and harassment outside of phone and mail contact is murky ground. The current wisdom in drafting a cease-comm says to state "calls are inconvenient" and to direct all paper mail to a given address. But if you don't specifically restrict contact to those channels, that rather leaves the newer kinds wide open.

What the lobby fails to mention is how some collectors have begun a trend of public shaming on social net sites, and that they really hate when people bring suit for calling mobile phones. You see, they *want* you to do what seems cheaper and convenient, and keep using that phone and sending email and thumbing text notes and not preserving your rights. The collectors want to put the touch on you in every way imaginable and as yet not invented, and become totally immune to lawsuits for annoying you from every direction.

I've read recently that junk debt buyers tend to pass on buying a portfolio, which can hold thousands of accounts, in which over three percent of accounts have been disputed. Can you imagine such a low pain threshold in your job? This means that three of a hundred people made the collectors' task difficult, possibly with a single letter apiece. This is an industry predicated on consumers doing nothing in repsonse, or more to the point, doing nothing useful in direct challenge. Voices fade, paper survives. Rely on the latter and your rights survive as well.

What?  Do they charge you for talking to them?  I'd probably never know if I did get one because if it looks like junk mail, it goes right in the trash.  I went paperless and pay everything but my rent online, so my mailbox is usually filled with junk only.  I found a nice cease communication letter online to send these people.  I was thinking of changing my phone number, but they'd probably find the new one eventually.  A couple found my sister's cell number and we cannot figure out how.  Any idea on how these people find a cell number?  My home number is listed and I believe my relative used it on some credit applications because for a while I only used it for access to the internet, and I got calls for my stepfather (who doesn't come up if you search places for my name) so that explains my situation.

} "Do they charge you for talking to them?"

Return again to what I told Dee, and a few others here. Written notices to collectors should go out USPS Certified with return card. Currently a simple letter in a #10 envelope will run you $5.54 to go CMRR. It's cheap insurance that can save a lot of grief.

} "never know if I did get one ... looks like junk mail"

Errrm, I don't know if you're referring to dunning letters. Strictly speaking your imprisoned relative should get them and not you. If you did receive one I'm uncertain you could respond on the person's behalf. Generally as a third party you shouldn't.

Lawful dunning letters come in the most nondescript envelopes possible. The collectors rather prefer you ignore them, so you fail to dispute in the statutory thirty days, and they march you into a default judgment. But back to your issue ...

} "cease communication letter online"

Yes, there are many examples out there, most of them crap. The simpler the better; keep to the facts and what you want to happen. There is no need to cite statutes or make raving threats about what you'll do for noncompliance. They can read the laws as well as you. They know what they've done and also done wrong.

} "Any idea on how these people find a cell number?"

From the top of my head? Lexis-Nexis, Chex Systems, ChoicePoint, DMV records, credit bureaus ... and how do we know the phone carriers themselves don't monetize customer records? Collectors comb databases like you wouldn't believe, which is partly why I call b-llsh-t on much of what happens in the name of "skip tracing". I think changing numbers is a last resort, and you may inherit the junky call debris left by a number's prior owner.

Being very stingy about handing out that number helps a lot. It's not actually needed every single time some commercial entity wants it, and you have to assume that someone beyond your control will eventually trade, sell, or misuse it, just as with email addresses.

I beg to differ about one thing, My SSI benefits were not exempted, the court gave judgement to a lawyer saying I was working in NY, when in fact I was living in Kentucky. Well, anyway, The court passed judgement on me that I was working and had to pay this judgment in spite of the fact that I lived in Kentucky. How could I work in NY everyday when I live in Kentucky? Something is definately wrong there. Well to get back to what happened, my gf gave me money sometimes by check, and sometimes cash to pay me back what I lent her from my SSI account. My bank account was frozen and after I proved I was not working in NY, my bank would not credit my account for the legal fee it said I owed, they said it was not money from SSI, it most certainly was, and now I am screwed out of $75.00. I don'tknow about you, but when you are on SSI $75.00 is a lot of money to lose because some legal dept for my bank says I owed it to them.

Your story lacks the detail for a proper response and may be sliding off topic. There is a short thread on seizure of ostensibly protected funds here:

https://800notes.com/forum/ta-2ba51984189040a ... debt-collectors

I would work on getting the judgment vacated and shopping for a new bank. Could be you got railroaded between a corpo-friendly judge and inattentive bank management.

FAIR DEBT COLLECTION PRACTICES ACT (FDCPA).The whole ACT can be see here:
http://www.fair-debt-collection.com/rules/fair-debt-collection-act.html#808

§ 808.  Unfair practices [15 USC 1692f]
A debt collector may not use unfair or unconscionable means to collect or attempt to collect any debt. Without limiting the general application of the foregoing, the following conduct is a violation of this section:

(1) The collection of any amount (including any interest, fee, charge, or expense incidental to the principal obligation) unless such amount is expressly authorized by the agreement creating the debt or permitted by law.

QUESTION:

Would someone (Attorney, maybe) explain to me: In light of the above "unfair practice" in the FDCPA, How is it that Debt Collectors often charge Fees (for collection services?) or Interest charges (still accruing?), in addition to the original amount of debt (amount when debt written-off and sold to Debt Collectors)?  I've had both charges happen to me.

While the site you reference is less obnoxious than those usually funded by consumer lawyers, I think it is safer and more useful to first point people to the official source:

http://www.ftc.gov/os/statutes/fdcpajump.shtm

You can get a primer on the debt rules, the whole FDCPA in PDF for local reference, and all the old staff opinion letters still being cited in Fair Debt cases today. The FTC also stores all its press releases there about the cases it's filed against debt collectors.

I'm afraid you'll find it rare that an attorney sticks his neck out on a public forum or submits free advice on one.

Regarding charges above principal, your answer is right there in the statute, just not spelled out. A debt account typically is tied to a contract, the terms of which survive charge-off, sale, transfer, and collection activity. The terms of whatever contracts you agreed to more than likely said that a debt buyer can stand in the shoes of the original creditor, having purchased the right to collect and continue to enforce the contract terms.

If during litigation you want to challenge an amount claimed which seems to have ballooned over time, you have to apply the same math stipulated by the contract which was binding at the time of default or date of your last activity. With unsecured credit cards, for instance, the interest will often be compounded daily, which in a few years can send the total into the ionosphere. This is why some collectors will pounce in the final year before SoL expires, to try for the maximum payout.

Probably the contract also says a collector can heap on fees for litigation and anything else the agency or the lender won't feel like subsidizing. Usury law, the way our grandparents understood it, does not exist for us. It still remains the opposition's problem to prove a correct amount, but it behooves the defendant to take nothing on faith.

The long tail of lender contracts sometimes has a positive aspect. In the last several years arbitration clauses were a popular means for creditors to choke off class actions and keep disputes off the public record. The trendiest case defendants have been using those clauses to derail court cases and submit them to private arbitration. The cost is minimal to none for the consumer and can be very high for the pursuing business. This puts leverage back on the consumer's side and changes the math considerably, potentially raising the cost of collection far above the collector's claim.

Just pay what you owe and set up and KEEP payment arrangments with the person you are indebted to; this is a fail proof way of stopping collections calls!  It's not their fault you can't pay them what is rightfully theirs.  I work in collections, I'm not a bad person but am constantly treated badly by people who refuse to work with me to get their debts paid.  If you are late on a payment, take responsibility for your own actions.  This is the real world, when a bill is due on a certain date, it needs to be paid on that date.  These companies don't owe you anything but YOU OWE THEM!

"EMMA": But it is their fault that they harass people (including those wrongly targeted), tell lies, and issue illegal threats. That, as you might have noticed, is the real subject of this discussion. Would you care to comment?

I don't owe them.  Some deadbeat named Michael owes them  He bought a car planning to stop making payments.  To make that easier he gave a random phone number - mine.  At one point his car loan company was calling me 6 times/day.  I finally got rid of them by explaining the situation.  But I was lucky.  Some creditors won't listen to an explanation.  

Surely you don't think I should make payments on Michael's car just to stop the calls.

Do you have a specific response to any of the remarks I've made in this thread, or were you here only to lob another tiresome "Pay Youse Bills" argument in here like someone playing Skee-Ball overhanded? If it's the latter, you can get in line behind "Goldilocks" on the third page and see my reply to her from July.

I could tear open each of your breathless sentences in turn and refute them into paste, but this is not the 'Correct Way To Frame the Debt Problem' thread. I would suggest that if you are so subject to rude treatment on the job, it may have something to do with your haughty posture and accusatory tone on display here. You'd made up your mind before touching your keyboard that everyone commenting here needs to be punished for something. That assumption is the seed of all the problems we have with your chosen industry.

You need to meet this debate partway, and not project the willful evasion of some debtors to all who are snared in your firm's dragnets. I realize your work culture probably trains you to insult first and ask questions later. This forum is also part of "the real world". Don't act so shocked that thoughtful and cautious types are among its population, who don't hand over funds to random strangers on the phone without the challenge one is legally entitled to present.

Let's say you're not the caller but the call-ee. You're not the skip trace target, or the debt claim is thoroughly uncollectable, and you get a faceful of attitude like that which came storming here with you. You're going to thank the collector kindly for his diligent and thorough efforts before gently correcting him? Some of us have tried being polite and reasonable with your peers; many only have two settings: 'Nasty' and 'Nastier'. At best their settings will be 'Obstinate' and 'Misleading'.

Perhaps if your comrades in hundreds of scofflaw agencies could acknowledge the rules half as much as we few who properly defend our rights have been forced to by their fraudulent business models, we could have fewer of these draining debates.

I bought my house 4 years ago. The seller had the same tenant, Leo Galieno, aka Galliano, Galien, and his live-in, Kitsa Esposito, in the house for the 8 previous years. When we moved in UPS would not deliver to our address because of the scams coming from these two jerks.

Then the phone calls started................our two phone numbers had nothing to do with the previous occupants numbers. We then found out that for a "FEE" attys and actually anyone can get a list of phone number associated with any address. I used to call the collectors and give them his new address but Leo uses only pre-paid cells now.

You and I pay for these types.

Scammer.