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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Always ask for proof of the debt before paying. If they can't provide proof, you can contest it on your credit report and you don't have to pay.

I keep having debt collectors call me for a fake debt. I've been an AT&T customer for 25 years. About a decade ago I upgraded my broadband, and instead of upgrading my account they closed my old one and opened a new one. I got a final bill on the old one and that was that.

About two years later I got a debt collector trying to collect on the old account. At first I thought it might be legit, maybe I missed the final bill. So I asked for a copy of the records. They stopped calling.

A couple years later a new debt collector called on the same debt. Again I asked for proof, again they stopped calling.

I think my name was finally deleted from the spreadsheets they pass around, but who knows. Maybe one day someone will call again.

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In most states, this alleged debt would be outside the statute of limitations for contract originated debt (usually 6 years from day of default). Meaning that, unless you pay any amount to them, it is no longer a debt that can be pursued through legal channels.

With any debt collector or buyer, per FDCPA, they must stop calling if you notify them. Best way to do this is by a certified letter stating your name, your phone numbers, and that it is not permitted to call you regarding this alleged debt. Offenses here can net you a bounty in court, but worth noting most folks with valid debts, can't afford to fight the onslaught of robocalls from spoofed numbers, as is all too common in the trade

Requesting validity of a debt is also covered under FDCPA, but with some general stipulations. Legally, a collector or debt buyer is required to provide validation in the 30 days after the initial notification to you if requested in writing. Most will still send documentation out of this window if they have it, but it becomes less transparent under your civil protections for them to be mandated to do so.

Obligatory IANAL, but if you find yourself in a similar position here, doing a few minutes of research on your protections and common "gotchas" of dealing with these outfits is incredibly valuable.

That such heroics are necessary to stave off illegitimate claims is utterly infuriating.

Agreed. This is 100% unfair to the innocent.

What part of the process don't you like? It actually seems pretty reasonable to me. It sucks for those who end up on a list due to mistakes - but there isn't going to be a scenario where that doesn't happen however the system is set up. Unless paying back debt is done on an honour system I suppose.

Corporations dedicated to, essentially, harassment is much better than the first obvious alternative, which is having officials involved. If the police think you've done the wrong thing they generally won't be dissuaded by a certified letter.

The alternative is what's done already: debt score penalty. And demanding payment for debts without harassment.

It's not hard.

> And demanding payment for debts without harassment.

That'll look pretty much the same as what they are doing now. People who take money on the basis that they will do a thing in the future should then do the thing. If they can decide not to do the thing and walk away with the money then the situation gets a bit silly.

Persistently asking for the money back is about as mild a recourse as possible. The hoop-jumping to make them stop is horrible for people who get caught up by mistake, but is not that terrible.

The alternative is magistrates and lawsuits. That would be much worse. Getting into to a fight with the tax office when they mistakenly think you owe them money would be much worse.

The problem isn't that they're asking for payments, it's that they're demanding payments when they don't actually have any evidence that any are due, which is why they simply disappear when asked for any evidence, for a while anyway.

The problem is 1) when people act in good faith and assume the debt is actually real and just pay, 2) people who might be afraid that things escalate and pay to "avoid trouble", and 3) the fear that it might negatively affect your credit score. The power imbalance is very real.

When a debt collecting agency sends you a bill, this is essentially it's an accusation that you didn't fulfil your responsibilities and duties. I don't know about you, but I tend to make pretty darn sure that I'm right when I accuse of someone, especially if it's a very specific accusation.

While mistakes can surely be made with the best of efforts, it's the debt collector's responsibility to correct any, rather than just shrug and ignore any rebuttals.

Of course, that's not in their financial interests (quite a few debt collecting agencies "buy" outstanding bills and try to make a profit from collecting them).

It's not my responsibility to prove I don't need to pay something; the burden of proof is completely reversed; eBay has been harassing me for years for an £18 alleged "debt" where I have already explained in great detail and with great patience why it's erroneous, but they don't listen: they simply don't reply and then send a new message as if I'm talking to a wall. I had to block a whole bunch of email addresses and phone numbers, instead.

> The alternative is magistrates and lawsuits.

"Oops, sorry, looks like I don't actually have a bill from AT&T which says you owe anything!"

All DCAs buy past-due amounts for pennies on the pound/dollar. By the time they get to a DCA the sums have been written off by the original lender. So if the DCA can persuade a creditor to pay up in full, they're making a lot of money.

As for the law - in the UK debts are a civil not a criminal matter. So unless there's been obvious flagrant fraud they end up in county court before a judge, not a criminal court before a magistrate.

Consumer orgs like the Consumer Action Group (https://www.consumeractiongroup.co.uk/) and Legal Beagles (https://legalbeagles.info) who make it their business to offer free legal information for anyone being chased for debts, whether "reasonable" or not, with a view to avoiding a court case, getting the best possible result, or - in some cases - winning compensation for unfair/unreasonable claims and DCA/bailiff actions.

It's not unusual for lenders to have poor record keeping. People who keep original paperwork have found that some DCA "proof of debt" is entirely fake, assembled as required, with a creditor's signature copied from recent correspondence.

It's hard to feel any sympathy for an industry that operates like this.

I found that consumer protection in the UK in general is pretty terrible or non-existent, and that organisations (both private and government) treat consumers/citizens rather harshly, to put it mildly. At least compared to my native country of the Netherlands. I don't know why there's such a culture of that :-/

You think it’s perfectly ok for anonymous companies to extort consumers with fake debt?

my perception is that its less about it being "perfectly ok to harass" and more about it being a fact that mistakes happen, and the means for correcting such mistakes is not unreasonably difficult.

of course if you have an alternative idea please share.

When "mistakes happen", the companies who make those mistakes should be penalized, and the pain should be severe enough that they are incentivized not to make mistakes.

This is the very best advise when dealing with debt collectors.

There are several unscrupulous debt collectors/scammers that use public information to try and frighten people into paying off non-existent debt or debt that is way beyond the statute of limitations to be sued over.

But they are very convincing and claim that they will be sending a court summons (that never arrives)

My elderly neighbor got taken for several hundreds of dollars by one of these Scumbags until I found out what was happening.

And just as the other commenter had said, the debt collector never sent proof of the debt. Just more threats.

This is the modus operandi of the German state television.

Ostensibly they are independent of the government, but they get residence information from the government even if the citizen slave has denied giving out such information.

Then, even if you do not have a Volksempfaenger (TV), they send bills. If you don't pay, they pose (independent as they are) as a government agency and send a fake title, which normally can only be obtained in court.

1. Using nazi/opressionist slang doesn't help your point.

2. It's not just state television, but state television, radio and by now also their associated internet platforms. They also fund public offerings on Youtube etc..

3. Since they also fund things on the internet (though I think that still a small percentage of their total budget), it makes sense that everyone with an internet capable device pays. Shortly after that switch in legislation they also went from trying to detect if someone has one of those devices to just having every household pay, so of course they send bills.

There are a lot of valid points to be criticized about how the former GEZ is run (e.g. paying a shitload for sport event broadcast licenses to corrupt organizations), but yours are not it.

1. If you are triggered by humeruous exaggerations, don't read European literature.

2. They are forcing themselves upon the Internet, and I can assure you I don't read them.

3. Sending bills for something that a person does not want and enforcing that is protection money.

4. You are defending mafia tactics.

Literally people who earn something above social security level are squeezed dry by the ARD ZDF parasites with their bad program and high salaries stolen from the population.

OP is right:

https://www.stern.de/wirtschaft/news/gez-urteil--zwangsvolls...

A court found that the ARD/ZDF are a commercial enterprise, so their incasso tactics are not lawful.

Bringing up "Nazi slang", which was clearly using a term in a negative way (which is quite customary in Germany if you want to point out an exaggerated parallel) is dishonest.

The term was used in an anti-Nazi manner, but I suspect you are aware of that and just tried to discredit the post.

I don't know how things work in Germany specifically, but when I lived in England I was rather peeved by their TV license thing. The very first communications were full of threats and strong language, and pretty much demanded that I either need a TV license or declare that I don't have a TV (which I didn't). I didn't reply out of principle, as I don't think it should be my burden to prove that I don't use a service and I resented the implied accusations (British are really not as polite as the stereotype says – quite the opposite I found). After a few more threatening letters they said they would "open an investigation" shrug. I left the country before anything came of that.

(Not an approval of the other commenter's choice of language or viewpoints, by the way, and not sure what it is with the pile-on of new accounts here).

Reminds me of a time I had already paid a hospital bill a few years back. About a year later some guy calls about another $1000+ I owe. "Ok, I paid it, but send an itemized bill," I said as I was curious as to what it was.

Got a plain paper print-out in the mail with "medical services ----- 1,234.56." He called again I said, "you're gonna have to do better than that. He never called again, it was BS. Wonder how he even got my details?

There's an incestuous infestation of debt companies of questionable ethics that sell or pass around spreadsheets of names and debts. The provenance of this data is highly suspect, but they're so used to having to act like scammers anyway, what difference does it make?

One account from 2017 on the subject: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-06/millions-...

There is nothing you can do but laugh at the stupidity in medical billing. I've asked for it before like this too, and they respond with 1 line item that says "service - total". I asked "when the doctor mistakenly did that 1 test on me, was it part of the total charges" and they couldn't answer.

There are price sheets with unique codes on them that are used for billing in hospitals. These price sheets are used for a provider (hospital) to send to your payor (your insurance). They have the minimum amount of information on them to get the insurance company to pay their portion. They are not set up for the actual human being being treated to understand or find them useful. It's a systemic problem with the way the industry is configured. Good luck changing it.

When I get vague medical bills in the mail, I ask for an itemization. After about 3 times, I asked if they can flag my account as always wanting an itemization. Apparently that's impossible, so I had to call every time.

Super frustrating, but medical billing is so complex, it feels like it's intended to make the patient give up and simply accept whatever charges are present, and not even attempt to verify bills are correct.

Nobody would accept a single line bill from a mechanic for "car repairs", yet somehow that's standard for the black check of financial liability we sign up for when we see providers.

Believe T singned a bill for medical bill transparency this year.

Looks like it was an executive order, comment doesn't deserve downvotes.

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/06/24/7354323...

That’s ATT for you. They have the worst billing systems that I know of.

Back when they were pushing UVerse they wanted to combine billing with their other services. For what ever reason they weren’t combined to begin with.

Well when you did that you had to get both on the same cycle. UVerse I believe was post paid at the time. You needed to pre-pay as their other services. Maybe it was the other way around, don’t remember. Either way you are stuck with 2 months of UVerse plus your other services when you combine it. So a large bill.

Well here comes the fun part, I had that service for maybe a year. I canceled it and to my surprise nobody seemed to remember that I had an extra month I already paid for. The system didn’t seem to account for it.

I called numerous times and talked to quite a few different people. I ended up getting about 700 in credits because I was able to walk people through the billing who were able to see what was going on.

I thought about taking this to a few attorneys I know since this had to have impacted a ton a people. Never got around it.

I have often wondered how much of their billing system remains unfixed on purpose, as I am sure there is a non-trivial amount of "screw it I am just going to pay it so they leave me alone" payments they would lose if they had accurate and easy to understand billing combined with good customer service

I worked in IT for a Telco, and was intimately involved in the billing system, the multi-million dollar project to move everything to a new billing system, and then the new billing system.

From experience I can tell you the billing system of a Telco is at least 1000 times more complicated than I ever would have believed. Maybe 100,000 times. The number of edge cases and complicated stuff it has to deal with is utterly staggering, and every single one of them is being changed repeatedly by marketing and project managers and people from all across the company - products for partial months, discounts, packages, rate changes, non-recurring charges, changes to non-recurring charges, fees, taxes, government subsidies, overages, products that have to exist by law but we don't want to sell, products that customers have because "grandfathered", products that don't exist in real life but do in the billing system, etc. etc.

Keep in mind the billing system is extremely tightly coupled with the provisioning system (the one that actually makes the internet lights blink and the voices actually work), which has ten thousand more edge cases and complicated configuration than the billing system.

Once you dive into the provisioning system, the billing system looks straightforward!

My personal bill from the company I worked for often had mistakes, and frankly I was shocked it didn't have more!

You think ATT is the worst? Clearly haven’t had the joy of dealing with Frontier (the ISP).

I tell them I’m recording this call. They usually hang up. I had one say, “sir, it’s illegal to record this call. And I’ll have to hang up.” Never heard from them again. Don’t even know what the debt was for.

The only debts I owe are a student loan and a mortgage.

Great advice. Honestly, things like this are half the reason I don't pick up the phone any more if I don't recognize the number. I used to enable the feature that sent all unrecognized numbers to voicemail, but found this was too aggressive for occasional calls (delivery drivers, etc). Probably 4 out of 5 of the calls I used to get were either scams or robocall telemarketing.

I got that from an old cellphone company too that was acquired by by Verizon a long time ago.

I half suspect it was a scam actually. Like the other company bought them and just decided "naw let's say these people didn't cancel, lets see what we can get".

I told them I'd never pay them and so on ... they just quit, never showed up on credit report either...

I always tell them that I dispute the charges and that they should sue me if they have proof and most importantly I tell them to never contact me again or I will sue

What constitutes proof of debt, legally?

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