When a CA contacts me for the first time, should they not send their mini-miranda CRRR? Otherwise, how do they subsequently prove that my 30 days to validate, and temporarily stop collection efforts has passed? When I initiate contact with them, don't I just say that I never received their initial contact, and that my initial 30-day rights are all still intact?
The short answer. They don't have to prove that you received anything. The one unfairness of the FDCPA is, that WE MUST PROVE receipt of the validation letter to preserve our rights, including the 809(b) cease of collection activities. THEY MUST PROVE only that they allegedly provided the notice. THEY ASSUME that if they don't receive it returned from the post office within 5-10 days, that it was allegedly received approx 5 days after the date that it was sent and mailed. SO, an employee at CA1 decides he doesn't want to take todays collection letters to the post office, even though they were printed and stamped; so he loads them into his car and goes to get a bite to eat instead of the USPS, and leaves the mail in his car until later that night, when he decides to dump them into the trash dumpster. (IF IRS Agents did a MASS-FLUSH of peoples tax returns just because they didn't want to deal with them, what makes people believe that CA's won't do the same thing.) CA1 can still claim that they provided the validation notice, dispite the consumer never receiving it, because they will claim that their computer printed the validation notice for the consumer on xx/xx/xxxx. The only way that a consumer could prove otherwise would be if an un-biased third-party logged your mail (think of it as an equivelent of caller id for phone service). Unfortunately, as far as I know no one offers that type of a service, but the USPS would probably make a killing on fees for it with CNer's looking to have proof that they never were contacted by XYZ Collections Co, when XYZ Collections Co claims that they had.
Another scenario: CA gets account from OC with messed up address records, or original debtor moved without mail forwarding. (Maybe that is why they didn't get paid in the first place.) CA "locates" you with similar name to debtor. CA procedes to screw up your credit, after sending required notice to original, messed up address, where current residents just throw it away. As far as CA is concerned, they have followed FCRA and FDCPA. You are a deadbeat, and if you prove otherwise, its still your fault since you didn't respond to their "notification".
Well, I get my neighbors mail from time to time. This seems real fair now, doesn't it? -NOT! Are the courts under some delusion that USPS works like clock work? USPS refuses to forward to a mail to a new address after a prescribed time period. Why must I mail anything to the CA CRRR then, can't I just make the same claim. My computer can record that printed a verification request on date xx/xx/xxxx too! This seems twisted and unfair to me.
The only difference, is the CA will try to get the court to view their computer's log of when they sent correspondence as absolute proof that it was sent, (we know they would never alter their own computer records *cough*); of course, they on the other hand will say that they know that we would falsify any records on our own computer. With the green card its now not just our word against theirs, its corraborated by an independant third party, the USPS.
