Cease and Desist Letter

A Cease Comm will leave the CA 2 options: return it to the OC or Sue. How significant is the debt?

The 3 Chase accounts are about $50,000, and the 3 Citi accounts are about $50,000.

If you intend on settling with them you may not want to send a cease and desist letter because you cut the line of communication off and like Nascar said they could just sue you out of spite. You are dealing with a fair amount of debt and no reason to provoke a lawsuit. I would suggest that if you intend on settling with them send a DV letter and once they validate the debt contact them by phone and work some sort of settlement arrangement out.

Yes, I am doing a DV and will hopefully settle with 2 of the 3 Chase accounts this week. Next will be Citi, but I"ll need to make payments on that one, not sure the CA will do that.

Since the CA's seem to be in such a big hurry for their money, how do I go about paying them? Overnight a check?

Make sure you have a settlement offer in writing before you send them anything.

WOW. That is very significant. You will want to do some real haggling in order to settle these. You might want to look at this thread about negotiating:

http://www.debtconsolidationcare.com/settlement/how-to-negotiate.html

If you send a C and D letter to a CA they will continue to send you letters to settle by mail with offers and even prizes if you pay them enough. CAs rarely sue. There are many who threaten to sue but few who follow up on it. They are after the easy money. Most CAs are cube farms with dozens of collectors with hundreds of cases. They work on commisison.

In this case, I think they'll try to sue as the amount of money involved is pretty big. But debt validation will kill them off right away or make them do what they intended to do all along.

I'd say let them try and sue and then let them try and validate the debt in front of the judge. You of course have to file discovery motions before the trial and that may stop it dead if they don't have the right docs.

Quote:

If the OC still owns the accounts, I wouldn't gamble on them not being able to produce every scrap of paper that pertains to your accounts in court. In the world we live in with electronic storage measured in Terabytes and warehouse after warehouse filled with hard copies, you can bet they still have access to those documents. Now if you were dealing with a 2nd or 3rd JDB, chain of custody would likely be limited to a manilla folder with your name and amount on it. With a debt this fresh, I think settling is the best option.

I did have one OC pull my account back from the CA after a CD, but the account had not yet been charged off.

Nascar is right about easy access to all the proof they need as long as this wasn't ID theft or something. Since you are basically still dealing with the OC and the CA that collects specifically for them then they would have access to all those documents. Banks tend to keep those documents for years. As an example I had an issue with 5th 3rd bank over a transaction that had occured in 1996. I didn't become aware of the issue until something like 2002. It took a lot of forceful communication on my part but I eventually forced them to pull all the statements that were generated in 1996 in order to prove that they made a mistake. It took them a while but they did have everything archived.

I can't remember the exact numbers anymore but 5th 3rd bank was trying to collect something like $500.14 from me for an account that supposedly was overdrawn. I specifically went into the bank and closed the account with a zero balance since I was moving out of town. Since I moved they could not locate me to inform me that the account was supposedly overdrawn. I got a call from a collector on the account years later. After forcing them to do all the research it was obvious what happend. For some reason the bank charged me 14 cents after the account was closed. They then proceeded to tag me with months and months of fees. Stupid 5th 3rd. Anyway I got them to reverse eveything but it took me about 3 months of arguing to do it. Of course they insisted that I owed them the 500.14. I told them if they could not prove it then I would pay nothing. Finally I got them to pull the records which settled everything.