OC trying to collect debt way past SOL

No they are all bark and no teeth, if it is over 10 years old it is way past time for reporting data to the credit reporting agencies.

All you have to do is send them a full cease & desist letter saying not to call you or mail you any thing.

 

Yeah in your case you don't need to wait on them to reply, you know you don't legally owe on a time barred debt. Just rip the band aid off quickly and get it over with.

Yeah just send out the C&D letter. Be sure to send it certified mail return receipt requested. And keep a copy of the letter for your records in case they try to say you did not send it.

 

Advising someone to send a cease & desist is advising them to hurry up and get sued because a cease & desist leaves the debt collector no other way to communicate with the consumer. I wish I had a buck for every time I've had to pull someone's fat out of the fire after they listened to the dangerous advice of somebody they found on some message board and fired off a cease & desist letter. Quite often it is already too late and they are being sued. Had they not heeded such bad advice they might not have ever had to respond to a summons and complaint.

 

Full Cease & Desist is not always good, especially if the consumer is still within the statute of limitations - I do agree there. But when you know the debt has expired, it is ok to send a full cease and desist.

The collection agency does have the right to contact the consumer one last time to tell them if they forward collection back to original creditor of it they plan to sue.

If they plan to sue - all the consumer has to do is show up in court and point out that the debt is time barred and the judge will throw the case out.

 

There is a limited cease and desist also where you just inform them to not call you but send all correspondence by mail.

Either way it is simple enough not to need a letter format.

Just give your name, address, the account number you are referencing about and a statement that you are informing them that it is not continent for them to contact you.

I had a utility company trying to collect on an old debt, and they new they were out of luck when I talk to them once, but it is also their right to black list a person and never provide service to them ever again.

I can't remember right, it might be that a c&d can't work on a creditor. If you own a cell phone you can definitely tell them not to call you there - thus limiting them to just writing you. But as far as suing you they can't do that.

 

I would not count on that. First of all just showing up in court opens the possibility that the judge will rule that the defendant didn't file a response and just grant default judgment. That's one great likelihood although some judges will be good enough to listen even though no response was filed. It is up to the judge and I would hate to think I told someone that all they had to do was show up in court and they could get the case dismissed then have them come back later crying that they listened to me and got them a judgment.

Then what will the defendant do if the judge demands proof of the last payment and they believed your telling them all they had to do was show up in court and get it dismissed so they didn't have any proof of their last payment date?

I think I would be extremely cautious about giving advice that stood an excellent chance of getting someone a default judgment when they might have won if they had received better advice.

 

Where in FDCPA does it say anything about a limited cease and desist? If the law does not authorize such a thing then that right does not exist. FDCPA does allow for cease and desist letters. It also provides for two distinctly different ways to implement that provision depending on different circumstances. However it says nothing about limited cease and desist.

Limited cease and desist can only be a phrase that was originally used by some now unknown person that spread his/her beliefs far and wide. Might have been somebody who had a radio show or a TV show or maybe authored some book or article that got published somewhere. A person who was somehow considered to be some kind of an authority on the matter. I have no idea who that might have been. Some people such as Suze Ormand or Dave Ramsay (for example) are considered to be great authorities when it comes to financial matters but they make grave mistakes from time to time just like anyone else. We are all human and as human beings we can and do make mistakes.

There is an extremely good reason why there is no such thing as limited cease and desist. Congress is smart enough to realize that if there is any chance that something they say can be misconstrued to mean something that Congress never intended in the first place the chances are great that it will be misconstrued by some or even many with unintended consequences. I'm quite sure that they realized that if they used the phrase cease and desist in one part of the law then later used it in another part of the law and in another way some debt collectors would use that as an excuse to file a lawsuit. So in the other part of the law dealing with phone calls and limitations thereof they used an entirely different wording so that the two would not get mixed up and someone sued unintentionally.
Then some supposed expert who may only have been trying to explain the concept in such a way that they thought would make it easy to understand ended up getting his/her statements misconstrued as well and a whole new concept of law became legendary. I don't know how the idea of limited cease and desist got started and I really don't care. All I know is that there is no such thing as limited cease and desist in FDCPA. Maybe there is in some other law that I don't know about but not in FDCPA. The same type of situation came about recently when one of my students who thinks he has suddenly became an expert and told somebody on a conference call that he chaired that if a debt collector did something wrong they had committed fraud. He further said that was right there in fdcpa but the word fraud does not appear anywhere in FDCPA.

I think you are misstating something there. Who says they can't sue you? If they can't do that then every court in the land is committing a grave injustice by allowing them to do so. I'm quite certain that is not what you meant, did you?

 

Let's look at it another way. Let's say you sent them a cease and desist what are you going to do about it if they don't cease and desist and don't sue you either?

And if they do sue you are you well prepared to go to court and win? If not then why would you want to take the chance that you might have hastened the day when you might be sued and not be prepared?

When following the advice of others we need to stop and think about the possible consequences if we follow that advice.

You ask what I might suggest that you do and there are multiple possible ways to deal with such a situation. You say that the debt is well beyond SOL. If that be the case then why worry about it? And so what are the possible consequences of doing that?
(1.) They already know that it is out of stat so will do nothing but try to bug you to death.
They might try to bug you to death on the phone in which case you can use my famous 18 questions to put a stop to that quickly without risking a lawsuit. You can find a link to the 18 questions and recordings of my using them in actual conversations with debt collectors on my google docs page. They can send you letters which you can save for possible later use but otherwise ignore them. or:
(2.) They might get tired of all that nonsense and decide to sue you. If they do that then you can easily get the case dismissed by proving to the court when you made your last payment to the original creditor. If you can't prove that by some means such as use of your 4 discovery tools or through canceled checks or some such means then they just might get a judgment. If you can prove that they filed after the SOL has ran out on them then you can file a federal case against them and make them pay you for their mistake if you choose to do so.

My suggestion is that you do no such thing as sending any cease and desist letters unless you have thoroughly studied the law and know exactly what you are doing and how to do it in some other way.

You can do exactly the same thing without ever using the words cease and desist and still be within the 4 corners of FDCPA. Just do your homework and there it is right in plain sight.

 

You are right, I jumped the gun, it is so crucial to determine if you have the documentation to prove last activity date, either by statements, canceled checks, or old credit reports. I should of said that, sorry.