Posted: 12/22/2008 10:13:41 PM EDT
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I just received a bill from a collection agency for late fees from movie rental store. I havent been to the store in question for over two years now. The fee is almost 80 dollars. Maybe I forgot to return a movie or lost it? I have no idea.
Ignore it? Call them and tell them to shove it? Blade a 45 deg.? disengage? |
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Quoted:
I just received a bill from a collection agency for late fees from movie rental store. I havent been to the store in question for over two years now. The fee is almost 80 dollars. Maybe I forgot to return a movie or lost it? I have no idea. Ignore it? Call them and tell them to shove it? Blade a 45 deg.? disengage? They can hurt your credit. But I'm someone who doesn't care at all about my credit. Hollywood Video did it to me, eventually it went away. |
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Find out dates, if it is over 7 years do not pay a cent, offer to pay a cent, or volunteer any information to them. If you do you reset the clock on a debt and it will appear on your credit report. If you fill out one of their "dispute forms" your giving them information which they cannot legally obtain.
I am dealing with something similar on a debt which was paid off 12 years ago. |
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I actually had one of those places call and tell me they wanted me to pay a late fee on a movie I never rented!!! (6 months after the thing was supposedly rented)
Natrually, I told them to fuck off. Then I told their bosses to fuck off. They eventually admitted that their clerk (some 17 year old kid) "might have accidentally" charged something to the wrong account... and they were "so sorry" for my inconvenience. I guess it finally dawned on them that I'd been going there for 10 years and they were gonna lose my business if they didn't stop being stupid. 
Call the people and jerk a knot in their ass. You'll get it worked out. |
| If you actually rented the movie and didn't return it, you do owe them something. They missed out on rental fees while that copy was out at least while the movie was new. Come up with a fair compromise and pay up. If they won't budge, just tell them you lost it and will purchase that copy for $30 or something. I owed over $300 on a nascar game that I misplaced from Ballbusters back in the early 90s and settled for about $25 by just telling them to mark it as lost, and I would purchase it. I also just sneaked a copy back in a store once and they called me and said they found it, but it was only about three weeks late. I felt guilty so I bought a bunch of crap from them afterwards. |
You could always write TedKaczynski, and see what he's up to?
Seriously though, do contact them and make them a lowball offer to settle, and if not, wiggle your way to paying something both can agree upon, that way your credit rating won't suffer. I would however try and get details first. |
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The debt has been sold for pennies on the dollar to a collection agency. These guys buy cheap debt and go full throttle trying to collect. In many cases, it's old debt that the original creditor didn't feel it was worth going after. (no need to spend $50 collecting $25. These new people purchased that debt for next to nothing, and are now free to spend some dollars trying to collect it in anticipation of X% responding.
You can defeat this with two approaches: 1) Send them a registered letter asking them to validate the debt. Unless you voluntarily pay, they've got to do this by law before they have any legal recourse. Typically they cannot prove you owe them anything, because when they purchased that debt they didn't purchase the associated paperwork/documents/ 2) If the debt is beyond the statute of limitations (states vary), ignore it... It is illegal to ding your credit if this isn't the case. The statute of limitation typically is defined as the time that NO collection activity took place. If you owe, and a company is constantly after you, for years, it doesn't apply. If you owe, and a company hasn't done anything to collect for a few years, the statute might apply, and they cannot collect. The old debt collection business model is built on buying $X debt for X*.1 (or so), and trying to scare people into jumping to pay (with interest). Many will because many are trying to rebuild their credit and are terrified of such a letter. How do I know this? Research... A few years ago, I got a bill for ~$100 from one of these companies. I never heard of the company that I supposedly owed the debt to, so I researched that as well. It turns out, it was the holding company for Appalachian Power, the power company that I used at my college apartment in 1990-1992. I suspect that my account was a few bucks away from being zeroed out when i closed it. App Power didn't bother to collect, and I never heard from them again. Years later, the holding company sells that debt for very little to one of these collections company who adds plenty of interest. They then try to collect. My debt was so far out of the VA statute of limitations it wasn't even funny. I just ignored it and it all went away... |