AboutCreditwrench Expertise Debt Collections law, Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA), Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), federal law, how to properly answer court summons for collection cases, how to prepare federal cases against debt collectors, how to deal with debt collection phone calls.
Experience I've been an active consumer advocate for more than 40 years and have helped hundreds of people win cases against debt collectors as well as helping them defeat demands for summary judgment lodged against them by banks, debt collectors and defeat mortgage foreclosures and keep their homes.
Education/Credentials Paralegal courses for the most part. I have been teaching people how to deal with judgments, mortgage foreclosures and other such problems both on and off the internet for many, many years. I am a Richard Cornforth information provider ever since 2000 and worked with many other organizations and causes since 1980. I was Oklahoma State Chairman for the nationwide drive to defeat the Constitutional Convention which was proposed by various factions within our federal government such as the Council of State Governments and the National Organization of State Governors who were working hard to organize a Constitutional Convention to be held in 1995 for the purpose of rewriting our American Constitution to be more acceptable to the United Nations. I worked with Senator Charles Duke of Colorado and Senator Don Rogers of California and many others across the nation to keep them from getting the number of delegate states required to lawfully hold a Con-Con and we were successful. I have worked with many other legislative issues in Oklahoma and have always been very successful.
Question I have a medical bill that has been turned over to collections. Can the charge me with finance charge? i owe $657.04 and they are charging me 15%.
Yes, they can and if you think that is bad just wait. The worst is yet to come. If you pay them they will report it as a paid collection account. That will start a new and even worse ding on your credit bureau history. If you don't pay them they can wait for time and lots of additional charges to get tacked on making the bill much higher then may file a lawsuit against you. That will up it even more. If you ignore the summons and complaint they will get a default judgment against you and start garnishing wages, putting liens on property, seizing vehicles, may even go so far as to send a sheriff to your home and seize whatever they can find to sell at public auction. In sheer desperation you might also get trapped into hiring an attorney like Rick Fefferman of West Palm Beach Florida. In this video [ http://www.wpbf.com/money/19930970/detail.html ] Fefferman claims to have filed hundreds of consumer lawsuits against debt collectors and the station adds it's own false and misleading statements to the story. It claims that a new beast has sprung up known as 3rd party debt collectors then goes on to make matters even worse by advising that people tell debt collectors to stop contacting them and then follow that up by sending a cease & desist letter by certified mail return receipt requested. That leaves the debt collector only one way to contact consumers and that is by filing a lawsuit against them. Fefferman himself can't be found anywhere on the internet except by two links telling about the video. One on the Florida stations and one on KOCO TV in Oklahoma City. That's where I saw the news story and started tracking it down. That's not the only bad advice by a long ways. The story is riddled with nonsense and downright false and misleading information. What you want to do is start learning how to deal with this situation before it really gets bad.
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