Cease and Desist Letter: Vital Information Often Overlooked by Debtors
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!
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