ceasing and desisting includes arbitration demands?

[Granny]

CPO,

Thank you again for the wonderful, informative post.

[GoingDown]

If more people would make use of the initial 30 day time-limit to respond to a dunning letter, they would gain more time to appraise their situation. I have sent a half-dozen validation and limited cease and desist letters (only write me, no calls), and with the exception of one local collection agency, I never heard from these folks. At first I was a bit apprehensive when I received no replies, but for now those folks are on the bottom of my collectors I need to deal with. I'm sure they are rallying new troops somewhere, but I'm content to sit back and wait for their next volley. There are some who claim that if you don't hear back or receive a response to validation, then you should follow up with another letter. In my humble opinion, I would not do that. If nothing else, should they attempt a suit, you have a valid counterclaim. I believe the same is true if you hear from a CA and they don't send you written information within five days of contacting you. I have one CA in the midwest who contacted me and never sent any information. I even have the call recorded. I'm assuming they simply pushed this debt onto a junk debt buyer. Who knows? If the company that contacted me goes for a suit, i have a very solid answer and counterclaim. Again, this is just my opinion, but there is no reason to feed these folks any more info or communication than necessary.

If nothing else, a good request for validation/verification and limited cease and desist letters lets the CA know you will not lay down and roll over.

From my own experience and from information from other people experiencing the same situation, the reason they are simply not responding to your letter disputing the validity of the debt is that it is now a general practice of many collection agencies to immediately drop any account that puts up a fight. They figure it is not worth the bother and expense of fighting against a debtor who knows the law and knows how to fight back against them, and who may even cost them money if they violate the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. It does NOT mean that it is over. The third party debt collector merely sends the account back to the creditor, and then the creditor is free to send your account to a new collection agency and the process starts all over again with a new collection agency. Unfortunately, you will have to send a new DV letter to the new collection agency to get them to stop calling. They pretend that they had no idea that you have already disputed the validity of the debt.

Anyways, we call this process "punting". The first collection agency was unable to accomplish anything without an uphill fight, so they give up and punt it on to the creditor who simply passes it on to a new collection agency.

The creditor, in my experience, will do this over and over again. I've already been through 8 collection agencies with the same debt being disputed each time. At some point, I have heard from others, the creditor will realize that they are getting nowhere with this process and then make a decision-- file a lawsuit or sell the debt to another junk debt buyer, who will then start the process all over again.

But during the time between collection agencies, my phone has been very quiet and peaceful.

[HRx]

"test"