My husband had a cellphone bill with Cellular One back in 1993 which was never paid off...the 7 year date has past and was removed from his credit report. We recently received updated reports and now Cellular One has sold the debt to a collection agency who's listing the date of last activity as 6/2000...impossible!! I'm thinking this is the date that they acquired the account from Cellular One...is this legal? If not, any suggestions on what to do next?
It is not legal. If you still have the old reports, I would send a copy to the cra advising them that this has already been deleted due to the s.o.l. having passed and they need to delete it now. I would also send a validation letter to the collection agency asap.
Steff, I would send a validation letter to the CA asking that they provide you with the date of the last payment posted to this account, which is used to establish the date of last activity. Whatever you do, don't send a dime to the CA or acknowledge that this is your debt. Leave the burden of proof in the CA's shoulders. Send your validation request in writing via certified/return receipt mail. akg
I'd tend to think I'd go to the original creditor for that information. Just seems to me that you would be more likely to get a correct answer out of the original creditor than you would the CA.
Thanks for your input everyone. I'm in the process of writing my validation letter using the template I found on this site. My question is, what do I do if they fail to reply to my requests? I see that there are several follow-up letters to send but what happens then? Also, I don't have copies of the old report so I don't have any proof of the last activity. I just know that the last time he paid anything on this bill was when we lived in Georgia over 8 years ago. Should I include something in my Creditor Disclosure Statement asking them to proove date of last activity or what? Thanks guys.
My experience with Gulf State was that they C&D'd after a validation request for about a year. Then out-of-the-blue, they resumed their collection efforts again, having never provided the validation. I threatened to sue under FDCPA, explaining I could document the violations, and they had better not continue to report. I then disputed with the CRAs, Gulf State elected not to verify, and the item was removed. -Cliff
Sending round after round if followup letters is just about the best exercise in futility I have ever seen. What is needed is a concerted action plan that goes from start to finish in a max of about 90 days. Anything that takes longer than that to complete is just proving how useless the preceeding actions you took were. If you can't get it to a head within about 90 days, you are just spitting into the wind. I am perfectly willing to make better explanation than the above, but not in public forum. We already know for proven fact that collectors are lurking and even posting and are actively looking for information about what we do and how we do it, so putting out such sensitive info on the board has to stop for security reasons. If you want to discuss my thoughts further, I will be happy to do so in private email Creditor Disclosure Statement??? The less they disclose to you outside of a discovery hearing the better as far as I am concerned. The original creditor is the one that has that information and is the one that has to come up with it. I'll discuss that too but only in private email.
