CA came back with "Validation"

Lots of CAs may be unlicensed in various states. If you think this one is required to be licensed in either AZ, or CA, check with the appropriate agencies, and file complaints if indicated. In particular, if they are located in AZ, are required to be licensed in AZ, but aren't, file a complaint in AZ. Whether they are legal collecting from you in CA may depend on CA law, or the whole issue might be different if the debt is not a consumer debt.

Nonetheless, you went to the trouble of offering a settlement with payment, he accepted, and you should hold him to it.

Send a copy of the check, since that establishes his acceptance.

Make a copy of the check. Black out your financial information such as account number.

If you are concerned that your signature might be easily lifted, you might "annotate" the check copy, say, with an arrow (that happens to go across the check and thru your signature, pointing to the MICR notation along the bottom added to indicate the amount paid on the check, adding some note such as "check for $xxx.xx paid to <OC> on <date>", as if you are emphasizing the OC was paid before this even was sent to collection.

Make a copy of the result and sent that.

CRRR of course.

The OC already has had access to your financial information. You sent him a check, and he cashed it. He could also have copied it, and the CA could have already illegally debited based on that, if they were criminally inclined. This is not some random "phishing" letter, since you know the OC and the circumstances of the whole transaction.

To try to do a "phone check" or ACH debit based on information provided in your dispute would be a criminal act. To do so for a "client" would be even stupider than doing so for themselves.

Their claim that you verbally "authorized" some payment would look pretty lame when you could show that they had instead received a written dispute of their claimed debt, especially one that refuted the claim with a check accepted by the OC.

 

Did you send the CA the copy of the settlement offer you sent with the check? Did your check refer to the settlement offer?

Did you notify the CA that the OC had engaged in work that required an AZ contracting license without having such a license, that he had not finished the job, that you had made a settlement offer based on the work actually performed, and that he had accepted that offer by cashing the included check?

Have you notified the CA that you have filed a complaint against the OC for illegal contracting without an AZ contractors license?

 

On top of being unlicensed, and not completing the job, are there specific items on any of the bills claiming to have completed work which was not in fact completed? Can you show that submitting the bills is itself a fraudulent act?

 

By the way, the amounts you are dealing with, although frustrating, are small compared to what damage could have been done.

In my area, there was a case that made the local TV news where a family paid a contractor over $100k toward remodeling their home. The contracter took the money up front, demolished a lot of the walls rendering the house virtually unlivable, then asked for more, when he had not delivered on the project to the level of the payments.

It turned out he was not licensed, that the license number he claimed to have actually belonged to a legitimate unrelated contracter a hundred miles away, and that he had pulled similar scams on at least 8 other families. The news attention finally got the state licensing board on his case, but whether the family ever got any money back is doubtful.

 

Can you reduce your case to a picture? OC says he did X, here is a picture of the area where he would have done X, taken on date Y, and it is clear X has not been done?

Did you send a copy of your settlement offer letter to the CA? That is what pins down the terms that his acceptance of your check bind him to.