I am so fed up with Capital One right now, AND all of its cronies. Basically, some jackass (former) friend and neighbor stole my identity, opened a bunch of credit cards, maxed them out, and went delinquent. She intercepted my mail so I wouldn't get any notices and see that something was wrong. One account went to court and she even intercepted the summons AND the judgement! Anyway, I've been battling this for years. Capital One last sent the bill to a company called Zenith Acquisition. I have tried to contact them for almost a year now. I've sent off multiple dispute letters and never received a single response from them. The only time I ever got anything was the few times my letters were returned by the post office as undeliverable. They kept moving their offices, but were still using the old address as current! So in March, I finally was fed up. I sent the Big Letter. It was the same dispute letter, with some additional ultimatums. I sent copies of my usual supporting documentation and sent copies of every single previous dispute letter. I not only sent the packet to Zenith, but I sent the same packet (with cover letter) to each credit reporting agency and Capital One as well, detailing the year-long struggle. Things were looking up and I was relaxing, until today. I got a call from a collection agency I never heard of, called LTD Financial Services. I had no new alerts in months and they didn't leave information, so I wanted to find out what was going on. Apparently, they were now collecting on behalf of Capital One. I, of course, am going to send the usual documentation off, but now I'm so angry! Zenith and Capital One never responded to me at all. Nothing. As far as I understand, once I send the dispute letter and my documentation, their obligation is to contact me with either a "okay our bad" or a "haha still yours" letter. I got zero. What can I do at this point? My credit had finally gotten good again and (I thought) this was taken care of. Plus, it was supposed to age off my account in March of this year, so now the clock is restarted. Am I going to have to go through this every single time the debt gets sold to yet another company or is there a way to stop it once and for all?
Have you filed an affidavit of fraud with Capital One? If so, and they keep coming after you, I'd sue. But the letters may not be getting to the right place if you haven't filed the fraud affidavit. You may also want to contact Cap One's General Counsel and explain the situation. You need to be in the legal channels, not dealing with the customer service folks. I assume you also filed a police report?
Would the fraud affidavit be similar to the FTC identity theft report? I filed that and a police report a while ago, which have been sent to Capital One and Zenith several times. If it's different, please tell me more!
Where did you get the idea that they have any obligation to contact you with anything? They don't have any such obligation. Who ever told you that gave you bad advice. There is no such obligation. They don't have to ever contact you again. Their only obligation is to never contact you again until such time as they have provided you with the required documentation. If they do contact you with continued collection attempts without providing you with the documentation you demanded then they have violated the law. The clock is restarted? More bad information. How can you put a stop to it? Prove that they have illegally re-aged the debt and file a federal lawsuit against them. Puts an end to that nonsense every time. But a word of caution before you do file. Be absolutely certain that they have illegally re-aged the debt. Just because it is a new report does not automatically mean that the debt has been re-aged.
Sorry, I was going by the FCRA § 611. Procedure in case of disputed accuracy [15 U.S.C. § 1681i]. I see now that only applies to reporting agencies. If what you say is true (and clearly I need to research before I just trust anyone's advice ever again, even that info which I obtained from the FTC site), then that means debt collectors can do whatever the hell they want, have absolutely no obligation to do anything whatsoever (as evidenced by the tons of illegal calls I have gotten from various collectors who are clearly breaking the FDCPA but continue to operate and destroy my financial history), and there's really absolutely nothing I can do. If they actually had that obligation, they would have provided documentation before selling the account to someone else. Again, clearly they have no obligation and it's just wild west operations for them. And where does it say that? Because so far, they have no obligation for anything and don't seem to give a crap about the laws they are supposed to follow. I'm holding a copy of each report from February 2009 that all clearly say that the debt will be aged off March 2009, with all the proper dates matching properly. It's not a coincidence that I haven't heard from them for a year and it's suddenly back in action. I don't want to file a lawsuit. I shouldn't have to. A consumer's only recourse shouldn't have to be filing a lawsuit and spending even more time and money over a company that flagrantly doesn't give a rat's ass about what little law there is. I've already spend thousands fighting and losing, despite my case being clear and solid. If it didn't work before, why would it work now? Additional: So, under FDCPA § 809. Validation of debts [15 USC 1692g], I see that the consumers are forced into a time frame obligation, but the collectors don't have to respond in a set time frame. Again, it just goes to show that it's giving collectors the go ahead to do whatever they want. Zenith never contacted me; I found out because it appeared on my credit file. After a year of disputing it and getting absolutely no response, they sold it to someone else. It doesn't matter if it's illegal or not, clearly they just don't care and no amount of effort on my part, even involving Cap1 and the three agencies, has done a bit of good. So still, consumers are screwed, especially those who are trying to fight errors and identity theft.
There are things that can be done,and what they hope is for you not to do anything,and you do have rights.State attorney general,BBB,ftc,occ etc.and last but not least our court system(also know sometimes as a crap shoot).So keep pressing them.
Selling or transferring the debt to another collector isn't illegal. It isn't considered by the courts to be continued collection activity. Yes, but do any of the reports change that March 2009 date? If that date doesn't change then no violation has occurred. There are only 3 options that I can think of. (1) You, the private citizen has to protect your own rights or (2) The government does it for you at taxpayer expense or (3) They get away with anything they want to do. If we leave it to government it won't get done or it will cost untold amounts of money that we all have to pay in taxes. Government puts people in jail for breaking the laws and then we feed, clothe and shelter them at a huge cost. Nobody gets any real satisfaction out of that. Just ever increasing taxes. Government decided that the most efficient way in this case would be to give the private citizen the right to go after their abusers and make money doing it. Nobody wants to have to go to the trouble of learning how to file federal cases so that is exactly why they keep on doing it to people. So few people actually do file lawsuits against debt collectors that breaking the law is actually profitable and at least comparatively speaking, the few times they get nailed costs much less than they have to pay out to those who do file lawsuits. What is a few thousand compared to the millions they make by breaking the law? [quote[ I've already spend thousands fighting and losing, despite my case being clear and solid. If it didn't work before, why would it work now? I don't know how you spent thousands without results. What did you do, go hire lawyers to do it for you? If so, that would explain it. Or did you spend the thousands listening to and paying for the advice of those who sounded like they knew what they were doing but really didn't? Additional: So, under FDCPA § 809. Validation of debts [15 USC 1692g], I see that the consumers are forced into a time frame obligation, but the collectors don't have to respond in a set time frame. Again, it just goes to show that it's giving collectors the go ahead to do whatever they want. Zenith never contacted me; I found out because it appeared on my credit file. After a year of disputing it and getting absolutely no response, they sold it to someone else. It doesn't matter if it's illegal or not, clearly they just don't care and no amount of effort on my part, even involving Cap1 and the three agencies, has done a bit of good. So still, consumers are screwed, especially those who are trying to fight errors and identity theft.[/quote]
