Asking for advice.....................

What state are you in? Was the promise to pay in writing or just over the phone?

 

You are depending too much on agreements reached on the phone, but not documented. All that has to happen is that one person you talk to fails to document your agreement, either accidentally, or deliberately, or simply quits, and you are back to square one.

After every phone call that you reach an agreement, or pin down the terms back to what they were, you should send a letter summarizing what was agreed to, mailing it CRRR to the party you talked to.

The new CA may have agreed to your settlement, but in fact the old CA did not have the right to sell an alleged debt exceeding the paid down balance from your original settlement. The problem is that you have nothing in writing to indicate that was agreed to.

At this point, you could ask for an account statement from the CA that you originally settled with, summarizing your payments and the remaining balance in accordance with your settlement at the time of their sale to the new CA. Refer to the terms of your original agreement, and to your phone conversations with both parties where they have agreed to honor the original settlement terms.

Send your request in writing, CRRR. The old CA should have no problem sending you a statement at this time of the account balance at the time of the sale to the new CA. They no longer own the account, and they agreed that the original settlement terms were still in effect, and therefore binding on the new holder of the debt. If they refuse to cooperate, contact your state AG.

Once you have a statement from the old CA of the balance when sold, in accordance with your original settlement agreement, you should be able to hold the new CA to those terms.

If you are no longer allowing them to debit your account, but will be sending payments directly to them, call them, FAX them, and then follow up with a letter to that effect, sent CRRR. Indicate that since you are closing the account, they are no longer authorized to make any further debits. You might first call and determine what the current remaining balance is, in accordance with your original settlement agreement, and include that in your letter, as a way to document and confirm that the original settlement is in effect.

In effect, you are constructing documentation of what the agreement originally was, combined with proof that they are acting in accordance with the agreement, by their receipt of your letters summarizing terms, continued acceptance of payments, documentation of the existence of the agreement with the prior CA, etc, to show evidence if necessary that there was a verbal contract resulting in a settlement.

At least at this time, all 3 parties have an interest in preserving the agreement: You; the Seller CA, since otherwise they have sold a debt that may be tainted for being sold on terms that breached your contract; and the Buyer CA, who presumably has reached a settlement with the seller reflecting any decrease in value of the debt resulting from the error in misrepresenting the amount due.

Six months from now, this might no longer be true. The Seller CA may have no interest in expending any effort refuting a later CA's claim that the full amount is due, or they might be out of business or have changed owners, the Buyer CA may either figure you can't document anything, so they might as well ask for it all, or they might have resold it to a new CA for the original amount less payments. The time to nail it down is now.

If they later claim there was no such settlement agreement, then the time for them to have raised the issue was on receiving your first letter that refers to it, and not after accepting a series of your payments according to the original terms.

Note: I am NOT an attorney.

I DO believe in following up every significant phone call in writing, and a short reading of many of the episodes on this site will show you how often that would have prevented either misunderstandings, or outright fraud. The guy with the records has the edge in court, most consumers keep lousy records, and most debt collectors manage to produce some records, even if they are erroneous or bogus.

 

Certified, Return Receipt Requested

Sending it Certified means that you have a receipt from the post office to prove you mailed it, and when.

You can look up the Certified number on the post office web site and see if it has been delivered.

When it is delivered, they have to sign for it, and then the "green card" (the receipt) is mailed back to you, so that you have proof it actually made it into their hands. The signature is on the green card indicating who at the company accepted it. A sticker with the Certified tracking number from the Certified receipt is stuck on the green card, so the particular letter received and signed for is tied to the letter you mailed.

 

If you have a settlement agreement, you continue to meet your obligations under that settlement agreement. You expect them to do the same. In any communications, you may clarify what you have already both agreed to, but do not muddy the waters.

Keep in mind your goal: You are both bound by a settlement agreement, you will fulfill your obligations, and you expect the other party to consider the account settled in full once you have made your final payment. You negotiated down the amount owed from $5k to $2.5k in your settlement, and you are almost paid off.

If after paying it off, they or another CA were to come back and claim more was owed, you would not treat it as just a new collection, but as a breach of contract, for which you might sue and would want both compensation for any real damages as well as punitive damages.

Why are you closing the account, and using money orders?

Although you might have originally not wanted to disclose bank account information, and you might have also originally not wanted to set up any phone check or debit authorization, at this point you want to document your payments in an auditable and provable manner.

 

Dude, chill out with the posting!

Your last post was answered in post #8.