Dealing With Debt Collectors
Hello, this is Lev Selecter, founder of 101creditrepair.com, and the topic of today’s video is debt validation. When your account is passed to a collection agency, they suppose to notify you in writing in the first five days of receiving the account and then you have 30 days to dispute this debt, now this procedure is debt validation. What you do, you send them a certified letter where you state that you are disputing the debt and their right to collect this debt and ask them for debt validation. It is your right according to fair debt collection practices act and after receiving this letter the collector should stop all collecting activity until they can provide the documentation as required by the law. Namely, they have to provide three things. First, they have to provide documentation proving that they legally receive the right to collect this debt coming from original creditor. Second, they have to provide proof that you legally have to pay this debt and they have to provide documentation coming from original creditor. It may be copy of the original contract with your signature or maybe one of the bills with original creditor. And they also have to provide the detailed explanation of all the charges on the account of the late fees, penalties, everything. And this requirement comes, was established in 2004 in a case of Fields versus Wilbur. So there are three things that they have to provide, well, usually they don’t provide it. You wait for about 30 days, and chances are they don’t reply at all, or they just acknowledge receiving the letter. But they don’t provide information as required by law. Now, until they provide this information, they cannot collect from you. There is no time frame as for how long they can take to provide this information. It may take two, three, four months. But until they provide it, they cannot collect from you. They have to stop all collection activity. Now after waiting for 30 days, and by the way, another thing you do in federal, you dispute the negative record with the credit reporting agencies by writing a certified letter, and well, these are the step you should never skip. As remember we have another video explaining why you should always dispute with credit reporting agencies first. Anyway, after waiting for about one month, you send another letter to the collector. This way you inform them that in violation of fair debt collection practices act, section 809B, and you request them to remove the negative record from your credit report. And they should do this unless they can provide information. And sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, and then you have some other options. One of them is to check if they are license to collect debt in your state. This is not a requirement for all states, but on some states the license is required and some collection agencies operating in several states may not be license in your state and then they cannot collect the debt from you. Okay, this is it for this video, recommend you to visit our website, 101creditrepair.com, where you’ll find more videos like that, our guides, a lot of information which will help you to increase your credit score. Thank you.