Hello, Yesterday, I went out for groceries and a summons was lying on my porch from a collection agency by the name of Midland. It seems to be from a previous Citibank account for $9800.00. Since I was not actually given the papers personally am I required to respond? How should I proceed?
Yes, you are required to respond. You should consult with a skilled "consumer" attorney that knows the FDCPA, FRCA, and your state law like the back of their hand. If you cannot afford an attorney, this site is very helpful. But, by all means, file a Answer and preferrably, counterclaims. Midland Funding is a terrible outfit but, they can get their backsides handed to them before a judge. If you can tell us what state you're in, that would be helpful as well.
You are only required to respond if you want to keep from getting a default judgment. Even if you do respond the chances are that you will get a summary judgment against you but at least you will have the chance to fight. I'm not an attorney so I can't give you legal advice and probably couldn't even if I were an attorney because you would have to hire me to represent you first. I can however tell you how I am dealing with a case I have filed against me at the present time. First I prepared my response to the complaint and a certificate of mailing. Then sent them both to the plaintiff's attorney. I did that last Friday evening and mailed the two of them to the plaintiff's attorney. I didn't get served until a week ago today so I haven't actually filed my response with the clerk of the court yet because I've had a bit of transportation problems but I got those fixed now and will be filing quickly. Preparing the paperwork took me about half an hour. Of course, I could do it that fast because I already have templates to use so that way it is really just a matter of copy and paste into an open office document. I always use open office because I have to do a great deal of emailing documents back and forth between myself and other people and if I use Microsoft word it has a tendency to splatter stuff all over the page and ruin the formatting. If that happens then it becomes a mess and neither party can make heads nor tails of the results. Open office contains all the stuff in it that microsoft office has in it. Powerpoint, spreadsheets and the whole works. Open office is open source and therefore free. It does take a while to download it and if you do not have cable or dsl you might as well forget it. If you can't find it or have trouble downloading it let me know and I will set up an FTP connection into my server for you and let you download the installation file from my server. Setting up an FTP client is easy to do. Just download a program known as filezilla client and I'll provide you a dedicated sub-directory to download from. I have been downloading lots of files from another poster's server the last few days. We started a huge file last evening about 7:00 and when I got up this morning it still had not all downloaded. Didn't get done downloading until about 8:30 this A.M. You can't send big files like that by email which is the only other way to send and receive files. Just so you know, FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. Hope I have helped you some at least.
What do your court rules say is proper service? As is usual in life, reading around a topic before asking questions is very helpful. You should always engage the assistance of competent legal counsel. Failing that, you should engage the assistance of at least half-assed legal advice.
The real question is, "Can I ignore this and then come back way later and claim that I was never served." See how Dumb Bob can read?
Somehow I missed that question. Just didn't see it anywhere in the original post. Guess I'll have to start using a different screen name, such as Mister Completely. I see! cried the blind woman as she shook her wooden leg! I see!
When you decide to answer your summons ask yourself these questions. 1=Did i ever loan any money from Midland or apply for a credit card from them? 2=Can they prove i did? 3=Do i know these people? 4=Can they prove what they claim i owe? 5= Are my privacy rights being violated by Midland in their quest to collect this alleged debt? Debt collectors use fear and intimidation as their nimber one tactic to get you to pay them money they never loaned you.Most of the times these dogs bark more than they bite.
Just my two cents here and I don't mean to be argumentative however, the OP's decision to answer isn't really a decision. They must or a default will be entered. I suppose they could ignore it but, that would not be wise.
Get a lawyer. You can file a special appearance but that is WAY above the layman and it really needs a lawyer.
A special appearance? Now why would he want to file a special appearance? Lawyers often make special appearances for other lawyers when the original lawyer is too busy to make his/her appearance so hires anther attorney to go in for him/her. Of course, that can cause problems for the special appearance attorney if the original attorney has made some grevious error such as violation of FDCPA or other law and the defendant files a lawsuit against the original creditor and the special appearance attorney also becomes liable at the same time. Other than that a special appearance is for the purpose of trying to deny that the court has jurisdiction over the defendant for whatever reason. That usually don't make much sense. What reason would s/he have to claim that the court does not have jurisdiction? Because he is a sovereign citizen and therefore the court don't have jurisdiction over sovereign citizens? Or is it because the court is a corporation and corporations can't sue individuals according to the United States Supreme Court? Or is there some other reason I haven't thought about that deprives the court of jurisdiction over the defendant and therefore gives the defendant reason to file a special appearance? I think we just might all want to hear why this person should file a special appearance and therefore would need a extra smart lawyer to do that for him/her? While I must admit that I'm not smarter than a 5th grader, anything dealing with consumer law that is way over my head I'd like to hear about.
You can't feasible file a special appearance if the court has subject matter and "personal" jurisdiction. You need to file an Answer w/ counters that have teeth. Midland will roll because they have no admissible evidence.
