Stop Bill Collectors! » communicating with agencies

How To Fight a Garnishment Without a Lawyer

Janice — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:15:37 +0000

The dictionary defines garnishment as “a court order to an employer to withhold wages or send money to court or to the person who has won a lawsuit against an employee.” You don’t need to hire an expensive lawyer who will charge you hundreds of dollars an hour for his services to fight a garnishment. There are ways in which you can fight for yourself and win.

Before you begin to fight a garnishment, there are a couple of things that you will need:

a telephone
the courage to speak to your creditors (without losing your temper).

Contact the company that put a garnishment on your bank account or your wages. Don’t bother calling your bank to find out this information (you’ll be sent in circles). If you don’t know who took your money, go to the court (most likely it’s your local county civil court) that processed the garnishment, and ask to take a look at your file.

Offer to pay a fraction of what you owe (low ball them as much as you can). A garnishment takes money to process and they would much rather receive a payment from you voluntarily.

If offering to pay doesn’t work (or perhaps you can’t afford payments), fight the garnishments by moving your cash around so they can’t find it. Don’t use that bank account again, because they will dip into it again (when you are least expecting it). This is almost impossible to do with a wage garnishment: you have fewer options.

If you are subject to garnishment, bankruptcy may be your only option. Once a garnishment is in place, even credit counseling won’t help. Don’t do nothing, because if you ignore the garnishment order, you’ll wake up one morning to an empty bank account and a bunch of bounced checks. Don’t let that happen to you!

Remember: creditors record everything. You don’t want to be in court and have a judge hear you call the debt collection agency a $%^ker (even if they deserve it). Keep your cool.

Cease and Desist Letter: Vital Information Often Overlooked by Debtors

Janice — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:56:23 +0000

Thinking of writing a cease and desist letter to your creditors? (See this article for a sample cease and desist letter). It’s not as simple as writing a letter to your creditor telling them to stop calling you. Here are 5 vital facts you need to know before you send the cease and desist letter to stop creditors from hassling you.

Cease and Desist Letters Can’t be Sent to Original Creditors. Cease and desist letters only apply to third party collection agencies. That means if Sallie Mae is calling you about your student loan every week, Bank of America is calling you every day about your overdue mortgage, or Citibank is calling you ten times a day about your overdue account, there’s exactly nothing you can do about it. You’ll have to wait until the original creditor turns your account over to a collection agency (usually in about six months).
You must send the cease and desist letter by certified mail. Otherwise, the credit collections agency will keep calling you, and deny that they ever got your letter. They are trained to ignore non-certified cease and desist letters, so make sure you beat them at their own game.
Don’t give the agency an excuse to say they couldn’t match the letter with an account. Include the current date, your name, address, phone number(s) where the agency has been calling you, and your account number. If you don’t have your account number, make sure to include your full name and date of birth.
Never put your social security number on a cease and desist letter, even if you don’t know your account name. Chances are, the collection agency doesn’t have your social security, and you do not want them to have it. If the agency gets hold of your social security number, they can use it to locate all of your assets, including bank accounts, property, and cars.
Keep a copy of your letter. If you don’t, you have no record of what you sent the agency to show in court (should you decide to sue them at a later date for FDCPA violations). The agency could claim you send a check, or another item in that certified letter. That’s another good reason to date your letter!

The Simplest Way to Stop Creditors From Calling You

Janice — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 17:03:54 +0000

If you want to stop creditors from calling, you’re going to have to pick up the phone and talk to them. That may seem counterintuitive (why the heck would you want to talk to them?), but you–like them–are going to follow a script that’s guaranteed to have them stop calling you. Peace is just a few phone calls away.

Why You Have to Answer the Phone

If you are being harassed by collection agencies, you’re not going to know who they are unless you talk to them. That debt you once owed Citicard, or Bank of America, or Discover, has long since been sold to a collections agency. That’s right: sold. Don’t be fooled into thinking that when you are sending money to a credit collections company that you are paying off your original debt. You’re paying someone else, who purchased that debt (from someone else) for pennies. And you’ll have no idea who that company is (or where, exactly, that company is located) until you talk to them.

Five Easy Steps to Stop Creditors From Calling You

Step 1: Turn your ringer on and pick up the phone. Follow this script exactly (once you have verified it’s a collections call).
“I’d like to send you something in the mail. May I have your address?” Don’t let them enter you into a conversation. Don’t let them pin you down to an amount, a payment schedule, or anything else. If they don’t give you the information, ask to speak to a supervisor. The collections agent won’t want to refer a customer who is offering to “send something in the mail” to a supervisor.
Step 2: Write down the address. Say “You will have something within the week” and hang up.
Step 3: If the same agency calls back (they might), tell them you just sent them something. And hang up again.
Step 4: In the meantime, send them a cease and desist letter.
Step 5: Repeat the above steps (1 through 4) as many times as necessary. Sure, it will be the week from hell, but you’ll have a list of names of creditors to send those cease and desist letters to. That cease and desist notice serves as a legal way to stop creditors from calling you for the price of a postage stamp (and a couple of bucks extra at the post office).

Debt Collector Harrassment: Craig Cunningham’s Secret Weapon

Janice — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:40:58 +0000

If you are being harassed by debt collectors, take a leaf out of Craig Cunningham’s book. Cunningham owes $100,000 in debt, and he’s inundated with calls from debt collectors. But he doesn’t mind: he’s earned a whopping $20,000 by answering bill collector calls: every penny of it has come from the debt collectors themselves! Most people who receive calls from debt collectors dread picking up the phone, but not Cunningham. He’s beat debt collectors at their own game by catching debt collectors violating federal law, and suing them in court.

How to Start Making Money by Answering Bill Collector Calls

Cunningham’s first money making call ($1,000) came from Equinox Financial Management Solutions, a third-party debt collector. The collection agency threatened to garnish his wages if he didn’t pay, and put a lien on his house. Luckily, Craig knew that the Texas Debt Collection Act forbids debt collectors from making those types of threats. Cunningham sued the agency, and two months later was awarded $1,000.
Cunningham’s next suit was over auto-dialed and prerecorded calls to his cellular phone (a Telephone Consumer Protection Act violation worth up to $1,500 per event). He also filed complaints that agencies were not investigating inaccurate information in his credit report that he brought to their attention ($1,000 per violation) and filed 15 other, similar lawsuits against debt collectors.

The Simple Technique That You Can Use to Sue Debt Collectors

Know your rights: learn everything you can about the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act (FDCPA), the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), and any debt collections acts that your state has enacted (like the Texas Debt Collection Act). These laws are highly technical and the schleps that work at the agencies aren’t usually that well trained (there’s a high turnaround in debt collection agencies because let’s face it, who wants to work at a job 9 hours a day where your only goal is to squeeze money out of people who can’t afford it?). Use that fact to your advantage and study the law.

Debt Collectors Will Settle With You

Know that agencies will settle, rather than fight you in court: That’s right, debt collection agencies will send you a check rather than fight the charge that they violated the act. Why? Because it’s cheaper to send you a $1,000 check (settling out of court) than it is to pay a lawyer $350 an hour to fight a charge they will probably lose anyway. Debt collection employees are not highly trained people, and they routinely make mistakes.

How to Sue Debt Collectors

Not sure how to file a lawsuit against a debt collector? It’s simple: read this article on How To Sue Debt Collectors The Easy Way (and Win).

Reference: The Dallas Observer:Better off Deadbeat

Got Bill Collector Calls? Don’t Fall for This Despicable Trick!

Janice — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:43:36 +0000

The Dallas Observer recently posted an article about a new trick that debt collectors use to squeeze money out of you. And it isn’t what you would expect. Instead of using threats of jail, bad credit, and calling your relatives to tell them you’re a “deadbeat,” bill collectors have undergone special training to collect debt any way they possibly can. That includes this unforgivable ruse that will have your parents and grandparents cheated out of their life savings–if you fall for it.

Setting the Trap

In the article, Roger Weiss, co-owner of the debt collection agency CACI states that when debtors have “double-digit people” calling them, they are more likely to give money to “nice” debt collectors who are willing to listen to your problems. That’s right: debt collection agencies are switching tactics. But don’t be fooled by this sheep in wolf’s clothing: after luring you into their trap, the debt collection agency will try and convince you it’s a good idea to talk to your parents or grandparents and getting them to take out a reverse mortgage (that’s where they effectively sell their house back to the bank and rent it off of them until they die) or taking a loan against their life insurance policies. Yes, debt collection agencies would stoop that low as to want your parents or grandparents to lose their home and life savings you pay off your credit card debt.

Your $10,000 Debt only Cost Them $500

Remember: that credit collection agency purchased your Citibank or Bank of America credit card debt for about 5 cents on the dollar. It’s no longer about you paying your original debt: it’s about you lining the debt collection agencies pockets with commissions.

Send a Cease and Desist Letter

As always, my advice is firm: talk to the debt collection agency once to get their address. Then send them a cease and desist letter.

ID, Please! How to use the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act to Outwit Bill Collectors.

matthew — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 00:13:24 +0000

I can personally account for the times when a telemarketer called me and used a fake name. The guy could barely speak English and he told me that his name was Jeff. Yeah, right. Unfortunately, they have every right to do this. Telemarketers can conceal their names or even refuse to give their identity to you in order to protect their company’s assets, namely from getting sued.

Fortunately for you, when it comes to debt collectors, the law is on your side.

Under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, a debt collector or agency cannot under any circumstance disguise, conceal, or withhold the name of the collector from you, the debtor. That means when you ask for the collector’s name and agency, they can’t hang up on you or give you a false name. They must give you their first name and the name of the company that they work for. It is a federal crime to provide (or not) any information otherwise.

An issue that many people have is that they actually feel inferior to the debt collector or agency: they feel that the collector is in charge of the situation. Actually, it is the other way around. You, the debtor, are in charge of everything, from the times a collector can call to how they can contact you. The law never leaves your side.

Debt collectors have an entire arsenal of psychology that they are waiting to fire at you. They probably fire it at you and you don’t even know it. So take back your mind and show that bill collector who’s boss!

The next time you get a phone call from a debt collector, card them. Seriously, card them. As soon as they identify themselves as a bill collector, ask for their first and last name, their operator/employee ID number, the name of the collection agency they work for, and the collection agency’s exact mailing address. If they run through it fast, tell them to slow down and that the conversation will not move on until you have all of this information written down.

After you have everything, ask the collector to go over all of the information again for clarification purposes. Also, ask them to read slow so you can make sure that you have everything. Ask them to spell each letter phonetically (Alpha, Charlie, Bravo…). Hey, for the heck of it, tell them that you are asking this because you have the right to know this information under the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act.

Your overall goal is to make yourself feel like you are in charge, and inform the collector that you are informed. This way, they will think twice before pulling a fast one on you, like debt collectors all too often do.

Collection Agency Letter to Stop Harrassment Calls

Janice — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:49:01 +0000

Writing an effective collection agency letter seems like a daunting task. However, armed with a few facts about fair debt collection law, you really only need to write one paragraph to stop all collection calls and mailings dead in their tracks.

Sample collection agency letter to cease and desist collection efforts

Collection Agency Name
Address
Anytown, USA
DD/MM/YYYY

RE: Debt Collection Against: Your Name
Your Account
Creditor Name

Dear Collection Agency Name,
I am writing to your concerning Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, 15 USC 1692c(c) and request that you cease and desist all communication to me immediately.

Sincerely,
Your Name

Simply send a copy of this letter to each agency that you are dealing with. Make sure you include all relevant account numbers and send the colelction agency letter with some form of tracking (i.e. delivery confirmation, registered or certified mail). Tracking is vitally important. If you don’t do this, collection agencies will toss your letter in the garbage and claim that they didn’t receive it.

You can find a copy of the fair debt collection practices here, but it’s a lengthy, legalese document. The part that specifically applies to this post is on page 6:

“If a consumer notifies a debt collector in writing that…the consumer wishes the debt collector to cease further communication with the consumer, the debt collector shall not communicate further with the consumer with respect to such debt.”

There are a couple of exceptions, notably that the collection agency can contact you to tell you that they are terminating further collection efforts, or to notify you that they are taking a form of action (like taking you to court).

One copy of this letter to each agency will stop all phone calls and mailings. Although this is technically the legal way, the likelihood is that new agencies will crop up, or your debt will get sold. Then the calls and mailings will start again. The best way to permanently stop the letters is to “change” your address and phone numbers, see:
how to get rid of collections letters in the mail and how to stop harassing bill collector calls.