Out of boredom and the need to educate myself I was reading through the below case. http://www.tourolaw.edu/2ndCircuit/December98/98-7179.html Basically he was sent the dunning letter that had the mini miranda but it said "The district court concluded that CCI's claim that "the hospital demands immediate payment" contradicted the validation notice on the reverse." Ok, it has the 30 days dispute mini miranda but it also said payment was due immediately. Now we have all received those letters that have the required info but request payment in full. For example, some idiot CA just sent me notice for 14 msn accounts that were gotten under ccs I do not have nor have I ever have. On the letter is said' please send your check for the amount indicated above' It then goes on to state 'your compliance will prevent consideration by microsoft to activate additional D&B RMS collection activities' I wonder if this would fall in the above court case or if any letter asking for payment would violate it on the first letter received.
I looked at the last dunning letter I received, and it says "if you agree with the amount above".... It could be considered overshadowing, but its such a grey area. If you have them on more than that (or expect too), you can always throw that in as an additional violation. I think there are some FDCPA opinion letters on this as well, you might want to surf thru.
¿Por favor? ¿Habla Español Usted? I should think that it would. No, not any letter. Remember that there are 5 indices that must appear on their initial contact letter. The matter of concern to the law and the courts seems to be whether or not the language in question might overshadow the right to dispute the debt or any portion thereof in the minds of the least sophisticated consumer causing him to be more concerned about the consequences of his failure to act than he is about his right to demand validation or raise dispute. Anything that carries any language other than those 5 indices and the miranda warnings should be suspect and considered a possible candidate for a future lawsuit. Which brings me to another point which is that I just spent a very enlightening few minutes looking over a very volumnous lawsuit for a fellow in California. He had raised just about all the proper arguments that are so well known throughout almost every forum in existance today. Failure to validate, even in the lawsuit they brought against him, Spears v. Brennan and other popular arguments. The stack of documents he sent me resembled a book rather than a simple lawsuit over a debt. This person obviously had just about all his ducks properly lined up and staked down. All to no avail. They simply bulldozed him right into court where they nailed him. And once there they still didn't do anything to prove the debt. The stupid attorney even offered to give personal testimony if the court deemed it necessary for him to do so. But the point I raise is that it wasn't the brilliance of attorneys that got him into the situation he now faces and it wasn't the bafflement provided by a zillion pages of useless crap they prepared to sink him with, it was obviously the fact that they simply ignored all his pleas and got out the legal bulldozer and shoved him off the deep end. Quite frankly, I think that is one of the main reasons that what I teach is so effective. Put them on a tight time schedule and keep them there, pushing them ever and ever closer to the end of a short pier and into the icy waters below. It should be obvious that when the going gets tough the tough have to get going. They have to be prepared to go file on them and of course a smart defense attorney will simply try the same tactics that have proven to be so effective for him in the past. He will deny motions of the plaintiff and introduce his own for dismissal or raise objections about how the plaintiff's demands for admissions or production of evidence are irrelevant or would place undue financial burdens upon the defendant and other shady objections and motions hoping that the plaintiff will run out of steam and give up and he will win the day. All of those are just standard practice and all attorneys know all about how to proceed whereas the poor plaintiff probably don't unless he has someone to help him and since he usually has little or no money and insufficient knowledge of the law he will probably just throw up his hands and go high-tailing it for the tall timber. So in order to win you have to do what the winners do and in this case that sometimes means that you have to already have the means of taking it to the bitter end and beyond. To summarize, you can't just rely on defense. You sometimes have to take the fight to their lands.
