i have another cra threatening me, what are my rights?

Check your state's statute of limitations. After so many years, as set for by each state's SOL, they lose their legal enforceabilty of a debt.

Despite the fact that it may be past the SOL, you can offer a PFD. Given that they are not legally entitled to any money any more, they just might take the bait.

 

Try this site: http://www.creditinfocenter.com/rebuild/statuteLimitations.shtml

 

Okay, you have a tough one here to speak to, but easy to actually deal with. So, bear with me, this will be a bit long.

First, if this hospital visit did occur in 1998 (and your were only 17 years old), then:

1) Technically, YOU are not liable for the debt, your parents are, BUT we do not want collections agencies bothering your parents. We'll deal with that next.

2) No matter which state you live in, nine years would put this debt past the legal Statute Of Limitations for legal action (I'll further explain below). So, the CA will NOT be able to "win" a judgement. You will have to "raise the defense" of past SOL though.

3) Again, if it is nine years old, then this item cannot report on your credit reports, if it is, then someone is illegally "reaging" the account. You can pursue legal action for this. The same applies to your parents' credit reports also.

But, YOU must take some actions here:

1) On the next call from the collection agency/agencies, ask if they have sent a letter of first notice, and where and when sent. (Did you receive any letters from the agencies?)

2) Write a letter requesting "Validation Of Debt" to the CRAs, review the sample letters on this forum, and post your drafted letter for review here before sending. Demand full validation with evidence of insurance claim submission, and insurance payments received.

3) In your "Debt Validation" letter, you will be adding the language that you firmly believe that this debt is completely past any legal Statute Of Limitations, and if any legal action is taken against you (or your parents), then you will "raise the defense of past SOL". DEMAND proof that this debt is not past SOL, and state that if they cannot provide this proof within 30 days of receipt of letter, then this matter is assumed closed.

4) Investigate what medical insurance was paid on this debt (if any). Contact your provider (at the time), and get in writing an "Explanation of Benefits" for this claim.

 

Sorry, not done, hit submit by mistake while editing!

First, before above actions, review your credit reports to see if this item is reported. If you have not pulled them this year, go to www.annualreport.com
Have your parents do the same just to be safe.

Search the forum for posts by Cap1sucks, he just posted a great procedure for dealing with a collection agency on the phone. Print it out, and keep it by the phone. You can use this technique if you want to call them!

Also read the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act at www.ftc.gov. This will give you clear insight into what they cannot do, and what you can do!

Remember, doing all of the above (outside of medical insurance), will not make this debt "go away" completely. It will stop these CAs only. Most likely they will sell the debt to another CA, and you will have to go through all of these actions again.

Defintiely investigate the insurance payments, and look to clear up this mess ASAP. Rest assured though, that the collection agencies cannot "get you" with any legal, or credit reporting actions. You just have to raise the defense of past SOL. SO, do NOT be intimadated by them. You will end up being the one with "legal recourse" most likely.

So, in summary:

Review your credit reports, and your parents'

Write a "Debt Validation Request" letter, send Certified Mail Return Receipt Requested", include item of past SOL, demand proof it belongs to you, and is within SOL for legal remedy.

Investigate what the insurance company paid, and did not pay. Find out "why" are all transactions.

Start preparing yourself to get the mindset to sue these collections agencies should you find violations of the FDCPA.

 

Quite frankly I wouldn't trust creditinfocenter to give me the time of day, much less any reliable info about statute of limitations. Their data is old and outdated so can't be relied on.

There are only three online resources I trust when it comes to statute of limitations data. Here they are in order of reliability.

1. Your actual state statutes which you can find on your state gov web sites.
2. Bankrate.com

3. lawdog.com

And always remember that if you are sued on an out of stat debt you have to file a proper answer and go to court and defend or they will get a judgment anyway.

 

Cap1sucks, can you post your thread on handling a call from a CA, for this poster? It was good information for this situation.

 

Thanks for the heads up!

 

It is even worse than that by far. You want them to have your correct address even if you are in default. Most debtors who have no means of paying their debts make many "deadly" mistakes. Here are some of them.

1. Hiding new addresses.
2. Refusing to answer the telephone. The way to put a stop to telephone harassment is to remember that debt collectors all work from a script, a canned speech. They either use the one the company gave them or they end up developing their own. Sure, they vary from the script depending on how the conversation goes but are trained to handle certain situations in certain ways. They work on a base salary plus commission and their cannend speeches are designed to maximize collections and bonus checks. If you want to stop their phone calls then you must do the same thing they do. You must have a canned speech of your own. You must answer the phone and take control of the conversation immediately. Debt collectors never want to answer questions. They want to only ask them and get answers. Take control of the conversation by asking such questions as.
1. What did you say your name was? (ANS. Jane)
No, your full name? What is your full name? Stay on the point until you get
an answer.

2. What company do you work for?
3. What is your address? (Be sure to get the full address, City, state and zip code.) Take your time and act like you are writing it down every time even if you aren't. Make them repeat or spell out street and city names. Act like you don't spell too good or write too fast. If they want to know why you need the company address ask them how else you would pay them if you don't know where to send the money. If they say they will take your payment over the phone tell them you never make payments over the phone because you can't get a paper receipt that way.

4. What is your phone number? If they ask why you want their phone number tell them you might lose their address and have to call up to get it when you send the money.

5. What is the name of the company you are trying to collect for?

6. What is their address? (Go through the same routine as above.

7. What is their phone number?

8. How much money do they claim I owe?

9. Are you recording this call? (if they say yes, then say "Good! Then I'm sure you don't mind that I'm recording the call too." You would be surprised how many times the line suddenly goes dead right then and there. ) Say it even if you aren't recording the call which you should always do. Remember that you can record calls no matter what your state law says so long as you don't play the recording to any third party. FCC law says that playing a recorded phone call to a third party is what is illegal. That goes for ham radio transmissions too. Recording isn't illegal, playing it to others might be depending on what state you live in. Recording of phone calls is always legal if you have reason to believe that the conversation might contain information about illegal activities It is illegal to violate FDCPA isn't it? It is logical to record a debt collector because you suspect that illegal activity might occur on the phone.

10. What is your address? (ANS. I already gave you my address) No, I want your home address. (Which you will never get(LOL)

11. What is your phone number? (ANS. I already gave my phone number) No, I want your home phone number.(Which you will never get)

12. What is your social security number? (Which you willl never get)

13. Will you validate the debt? Be sure to tell them that you dispute the debt and every portion there of until they validate the debt. This will always get an interesting conversation going, trust me on that. (LOL)

At any point that they refuse to answer the question switch to #13 and get ready to hang up on them. If they scream at you scream back at them until they stop it.

Do they have to answer all those questions? Of course not. But it sure does waste an awful lot of their precious time which they could be using to collect money from someone who will pay up and it don't take more than 3 or 4 calls before they realize that and stop calling you which is what you wanted in the first place. Mission accomplished.

3. Trying to duck the process server or sheriff trying to serve summons.
That's guaranteed to get you a default judgment which you will have a terrible time trying to get vacated later. Ducking the process server can have some other interesting side effects you really don't want to find out about too so don't do that. Be nice to the process server. They are doing their job and that is all. Study the papers closely. Notice how many days you have to answer the summons. Be sure you respond to the summons timely even if it is to file motion for an extension of time to answer. Never listen to those who would try to get you to actually answer the summons as your first response.
Never think that a letter to the judge will get the job done. It won't. Your first response to the summons filed only 3 to 5 days before the deadline should probably be a request for a more definitive statement instead of an answer.
Follow the rules of procedure and demand definitive answers based on statements in the complaint. Don't ask any questions. Save those for your interrogatories later. Don't demand production of any documents. Save those for your demand for production of documents later. Study your rules of procedure and learn what you can and cannot ask. When you run out of things you can ask for more definitive statements about then it will be time to think about filing motions to dismiss their case and after that file your answers and your affirmative defenses. Once those are in it is time to move on to interrogatories, admissions and demand for production of documents. Get yours in to them before they send theirs to you if you possibly can. There is a definite time limit within which time the respondent must answer or their failure to answer can be deemed admitted by the court. You must understand and know in advance that attorneys will never directly answer any interrogatory, never admit anything and will often try to evade providing any documentation. You need to do the same. They will always base their answers on rules of procedure or evidence. You must do the same.

4. Ignoring letters.
5. Throwing letters in the trash.
6. Ignoring letters from attorneys.
7. Refusing to sign for certified letters.
That will always lose you valuable information and the chance to defend your rights by failing to file suit against them in federal court for violations of FDCPA, TILA or other laws. Always remember that it is better to be a plaintiff in federal court than it is to be a defendant in any court.

8. Ignoring summons because you think you have no defense.
9. Looking for easy ways out of your mess such as borrowing more money to pay off what you owe now. It only digs your hole deeper. If want to get out of the hole you are in then don't dig it any deeper.

Those are just a few. There are probably more.

If you want to be absolutely certain to lose your case and get a nice judgment against you the best way to do that is to listen to or pay for idiot theories about how they didn't really loan you any money, the court don't have jurisdiction, you were never properly served, demand the judge provide you with his oath of office, or any of the other idiot theories you can find all over the internet. No matter how cute they sound they just won't work.

As a famous attorney once said, this ain't rocket science. It is all really fairly simple and about all you have to do is learn the law, learn your rules of civil procedure and rules of evidence and above all, use common sense. Stop and think before you act.

And no, I'm not an attorney and I'd be ashamed to admit it if I were. I'm not giving you legal advice, just the benefit of many years of experience.

I may be as green as a gourd and as dumb as a stump but I know better than to try to educate a debt collector or his lawyer. My goal is to learn how smart they are, not teach them how smart I am.

 

Thanks! Great procedure for handling a call....

 

Now here is the way to handle the calls. This is a live demonstration recording of an actual call with a debt collector

Here is another recording

This one gets pretty funny but it does demonstrate just how forceful you need to be sometimes.

 

Notice that all three calls are dunning none other than Bill Bauer aka Creditwrench.

 

And what difference does that make? You also have had bills in the past you didn't pay. So you got no right to play holier-than-thou.

What's the matter, you jealous because you weren't smart enough to think of recording all the times debt collectors called you demanding you pay what you owe and putting them on the internet?

Oh, I forgot! You always have better things on your forum, eh Grandstander?

And if somebody has something you don't have then you put them down, claim they aren't any good somehow.

Nice try there, cheapshot.

 

The difference is that when I had the bills to pay I wasn't operating a credit repair website that charged for its services, touting it as the be-all and end-all of credit repair information. It would seem that if Billie is a "teacher" of credit repair and he's getting hounded by bill collectors, maybe he should re-take his own course. Doing it my way I got my credit repaired and it stayed that way.

Not a cheap shot at all - just the facts, and if you want to read cheap shots, pay a visit to Billie's web site.

 

More of your misinformation and malicious falsehoods. Bauer does not do any credit repair whatever, don't claim to know anything about it and doesn't even accept money for credit repair. He has absolutely nothing to do with credit repair whatever.

It would seem that if you knew anything at all about the man you would realize that the same is probably true of him as well. You assume that those recordings were made yesterday but they have been out on the net for several years now. Once again you are jumping to conclusions about something or someone you know absolutely nothing about.

Again, nothing more than your usual cheap shots. He has far more and far better information than anything to be found by the poor souls who hang out on that thing you call a message board. They really are flyingifr and doing it deadstick and on a dead battery feeding the instrument panel.

Your problem is that you are so afraid of competition that you even imagine that competition exists when they aren't even trying to compete with you.

All you got going for you and your Rottie GF is a souped up ego and your constant grandstanding wherever you go proves it.

Again, Bauer does not do credit repair, don't teach it, won't accept money for credit repair and knows better than to get involved with it.

In fact, if you know so much about credit repair then why weren't you smart enough to know in advance that this would happen to you?

People can learn much more about credit repair right here on creditnet rather than let you sucker punch them into something like this.

Here is some more of your great advice.

You would obviously advise those foolish enough to listen to you to quit their job so they and their family can starve to death, lose their car and their home
, their health care insurance, not to mention their pension just to keep from paying what they owe even if it is through garnishment. If they can't pay their bills they can always go to court and put in for a hardship exemption from the garnishment. They don't even need a lawyer to do that. The court clerk will help them get it right.

And then your next dumb trick

You claim that in 30 years you have only found TWO collection attorneys dumb enough to use an Information Subpoena? I don't doubt that one little bit. Of course, those two dumbos obviously didn't know that all they had to do was send the judgment debtor an assets questionnaire and if they didn't answer that simply set an assets hearing for trial and then the judgment debtor gets ordered to work it out with the attorney. If he don't come to court when ordered the judge puts out an arrest warrant and he goes to jail until he answers the questions. Information Subpoena indeed. Why go to the bother of an extra trip, the extra expense of having it served on them and giving them a chance to file an objection to it and dragging the process out through a lengthy and costly set of court hearings. Why reinvent the wheel when the court already has the proper mechanism in place to do the job simply and efficieny? Only you and two other fools would think of doing it the hard way.

And here is another of your dumb ideas.

You are so dumb you would have somebody living on Raman noodles go start a company, Spend a grand or so setting up an LLC, probably in some other state then paying even more to get a registered agent for the service of summons and pay them a regular yearly fee, pay to have the LLC registered to do business in their state and all the rest of the expense needed to do it only to have the creditor's attorney pierce their silly little corporate veil and get the money anyway.

If that isn't enough to take your cake, there is a lot more of your ignorance posted right here on creditnet where that came from.

Best thing you can do is take off your war bonnet, stop beating your tom tom and go back to your silly little teepee and start smoking your peace pipe.

We don't need your steenkin flames around here.

Might be different if you knew what you were talking about but you obviously don't even have sense enough to realize that all you got is hot air.