I need some advice

Insofar as you're in Canada, my bet is nothing will happen. It's a foriegn jurisdiction which will make service and execution difficult and most U.S. debt collectors can't report to the Canadian branches of U.S. CRA's.

 

The lowest that Dumb Bob has seen is a bill for like $45 in with some other stuff.

Is it really three years for the SOL? You know that for certain, you just didn't read it somewhere on the internet? One trick they sometimes use is to wait till nearly the last minute to maximize the interest they can claim you owe. Because if it ends up being six years or something like that, you are in for a lot longer wait.

A good question which you might not be able to ask without popping up and making yourself seem worth suing is whether or not Dell still owns the debt. This is important because if it is now supposedly owned by some yahoo, they may not really have any evidence that they own it. And if they don't, you certainly want to make sure before you pay that they are really the owner. You wouldn't want to pay the wrong person.

 

Yes, chances are the poster probably did read it somewhere on the internet. Canadian law is different than U.S. law in many respects. Their version of FDCPA is much stronger than the U.S. version in most provinces. Each province has it's own version as well. Their consumer protection laws are available on line just as most American states are and so are their laws at both the federal and provincial levels. Just as this board deals with American law there are several boards that are Canadian specific. There are also boards out there which are British specific and many more for other countries as well such as German, French and Italian. Just as it is here, most boards are loaded with false and misleading information from people with dumb ideas mixed in with some great sounding information and ideas.

Excuse me, but if they have the correct identification of the debtor and the correct information about the debt then how do you suppose they got it if the debt was not either owned by them or assigned to them? Do you think they have some kind of crystal ball that tells them who owes who, what for and how much the debt is for? Or do you think the Devil himself tells debt collectors that sort of thing? It makes no difference to a judge who owns the debt. The only question before the court is whether or not you owe the debt, not who you owe it to.

The only way to get protection from that is to make sure that you get a paid in full receipt from the company you pay. Debt collectors routinely refuse to give any such receipts so the only way to be sure of getting one is to use bank certified cashier's checks and a cover letter if you are going to get stupid enough to pay someone other than the original creditor. If you don't do that then you are simply begging for trouble down the road and it just might come knocking at your door. If you are payng a 3rd party debt collector then the check's payee line should include both the creditor's name and the name of the collection agency and the account number you are paying for. As an example the payee line might read [Dewey Cheatum & Howe as agent for Dell Computers account number ABCDEF12345] The bank can type that into the payee line. Once you have done that you can sit back and watch points get deducted from your FICO score which would have happened even if you paid them cold cash and didn't ask for a receipt.

 

Of course the heat of the adversarial battle helps to decide which is which. So that's a good thing.

Let's assume that the debt is real but you don't know who really owns it. How could someone who doesn't really own it claim to own it? The answer there is obvious, if it has been sold several times, any of those who owned it previously would have access to all the same information. So your debt could become more than one debt or it could be some amount that you don't believe is correct. If the amount of the debt is now defined by a statement of account made up by the supposed buyer of the debt, it could be for any amount.

Really? So if you owe money to a hospital, Dumb Bob can sue you for it? Anyone who claims you owe them money is automatically correct? That's not the law that Dumb Bob has heard rumors about. Dumb Bob thinks that only those with standing can sue. At least that's how it should be. Of course these issues aren't usually brought up by people who don't have lawyers.

If someone who bought your debt, whether the debt is real or not, gets a judgment against you, who else are you going to pay? Of course you are saying that anyone who claims they own a debt that they claim you owe really owns it. Dumb Bob is having trouble buying that line.

If you paid someone to pay off the debt, how are you begging for trouble down the road? You said that it take "the Devil himself" for a debt collector you really didn't owe money to know about the debt. So it would seem that at worst the debt collect comes back at you and you produce your canceled checks to them. Dumb Bob really isn't buying this line either.

 

There are many instances of this around. You settle a debt with a JDB, and the next thing you know you are contacted for payment or sued by another company. You try to prove you paid the last collector and get told "sorry, it's not their debt, it's ours."

Short of asking for proof of assignment or ownership, pretty hard to prove.