Well, let’s look at it this way. Let us say your friend Bob lent you $20 a few years ago. You never heard from Bob, and in fact thought you had paid him. 3 years later, Jill comes by and sez she now owns Bob’s debts, and with interest and penalties you now owe Jill $500. Even if honesty would impel you to repay Bob the $20, do you owe Jill? And, if Bob/Jill has made no attempt to collect, do you really “honestly” owe $500?
The point of the SOL is that if it’s been more than 3 years, you don’t remember, Bob doesn’t remember, and Jill has no way of knowing, and you aren’t reasonably required to still have the receipt from when you paid Bob; you could have thrown it away due to the matter being settled, and if you all went into court in front of a judge, there’d be no way he could be sure who owed anything to whom.
Sorry, I didn’t mean that the OP was refusing to pay. It’s the answers – about hiding behind the statue of limitations, or that paying would simply be ‘money down the drain’, or trying to scare them off from collecting by using a lawyer, or trying to maneuver the bill collector into making some kind of mistake to use as leverage – that made it seem that beating the game was the goal.
As for DrDeth’s example, well, yes. IF I had agreed to pay Bob interest and late fees and so forth and Jill had proof that Bob had sold the right to collect the debt to her… yes, I’d gulp and pay. (And take Bob off my End of Summer Barbecue Invitation list.)
Very good points by everyone. Especially DrDeth’s scenario.
If I owe money, I will pay it (although I can’t afford a lot right now). I just am wary with dealing with debt collectors and am worried that even if I pay, my credit will still be crap and it won’t help me any. Also I am wondering how they can still charge interest since they are not Chase Bank, the one whom I made the agreement with, but rather some debt collection company.
What got me suspicious was that the people who called said they are from “Scott Lowery Law Offices,” which I discovered is really a company called Collect America. I googled both of them and have found some shady stuff. I think it is misleading and designed to scare people when they identify themselves as a law office when really they are just some schmuck debt collector at a call center somewhere.
Part of the problem is the way the system has defaulted to hurt the “honest” consumer who eventually pays off their debt. Seven years is a long time, but debt in collection is generally expunged after that time period, however paying the debt “starts the clock” all over again, as I understand it.
First question for someone who says they’re at a law office is whether or not they’re an attorney. Second question is what state they’re admitted to practice in.
Anyone who hesitates on either question is scamming you or stupid enough that my terrier could beat them in court. [She is a smart dog…]
What you should never do is answer any phone questions from a collection agency. They have tricked some people into confessing to owing the debt, which may reset the statute of limitations in their favor.
As soon as I have a debt collector on the phone, I move into question-only mode. I ask questions, write down what I need to know, and ignore their questions. You wouldn’t talk to opposing counsel in a civil lawsuit without your attorney present and you ought not speak to any creditor whom you have a shred of doubt about without an attorney; you are not the professional here, and are not trained for this situation.
There are literally dozens of ways to lure a collector into statutory violations, but you need to be VERY careful doing that and read up before you start. There is something deathly amusing about a $8/hr call center employee trying to navigate nearly incomprehensible regulations and threaten you at the same time.
By the way, if collector-baiting is of interest, you might want to Google a guy named Ryan Swanberg.
There’s a collection industry article about him here:
http://www.acainternational.org/media.aspx?cid=6855
Incidentally, on further review, Mr. Swanberg seems to have dropped off of the face of the earth, and I can’t find any way to get a copy of his book or audio CD.
Thank you Mr. Slant; very good information. Also very interesting about Ryan Swanburg, but also curious about how he seems to have disappeared…
You illustrate the problem yourself: those are some pretty huge “ifs,” and the person trying to collect the money typically is not necessarily terribly interested in providing proof of their calculations or the validity of their assignment. They want to collect with as little conversation as possible. Making them prove those “ifs” is the whole point.
It’s as if you asked Jill for the proof that she is the legal holder of the debt and that the amount she claims is owed is correct and she responded that she had no obligation to do so, just pay up or else. You might owe somebody somewhere some amount of money, but who the heck is this person, and where the heck did they get these figures? If Bob sold her a $20 debt for one tenth of one cent that the statute of limitations has run on and which the original terms can’t be proven, is she entitled to $500 on her say so alone?
Well, his web sites are all down, which is a bad sign.
However, as an amateur online book dealer I was quite surprised that one cannot locate a single copy of his book online, and as such I just wrote to him in an attempt to do a bulk purchase of his remaining stock; he did write back, and appears to in fact still be alive. He was peddling his book at $19.99 in Ebook format, which I’m afraid isn’t something I’ll be able to extract profit from with my current business model, but it does prove he hasn’t been kidnapped and fed to NCO’s genetically engineered pigs ala Thomas Harris.
Good point. I had a collector contact me about a bogus bankruptcy-barred debt that someone apparently fooled them into buying*. When I asked for written documentation in the first phone call, the collector indicated that, “We’re a collection agency, I don’t have those records.”
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
Anyway, I referred them to my bankruptcy attorney and never heard back.
*[This was 11 months after the discharge of the debt, but there is NO WAY it was sold off to the collector prior to the original creditor receiving notification of my bankruptcy filing… I was current as of the date of my filing. The only way this collector could have gotten it when the account was still ‘valid’ would have been if they bought the debt DURING bankruptcy proceedings. I suppose they got that receivables note super-cheap.]