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And then the second one I've been talking to you kind of ongoing has been a creditor, an original creditor, so kind of leads to a question I'm gonna have later. Who lent me money to put a heater on my house? So I sent them the debt validation letters. I sent in the dispute letters to the credit bureaus. I started the process in July. I started with, and I wanna give everybody tips about what I think has been successful in doing this.

This is great. You go and you pull your credit, and you can establish free accounts on all the credit bureaus. You don't need to get free credit report or any of that. You just go set up an account with each one, pull your credit, and then you just start disputing. What you need for the FCRA is you need to have proof that they didn't mark the debt in dispute. So you get all your credit reports beforehand, dispute it, then you go and check your credit a couple of weeks after to see if the credit was, if the dispute was, if the debt was marked disputed. If they don't put it into dispute, then that's a violation of the FCRA.

So with this particular creditor, I told them the letters that you provide say don’t contact me, and they wrote back in writing, “Okay, we won’t contact you.” But then they proceeded to call me 47 times. Wait, you told them not to contact you by phone? Because there's a difference. They can email, they can mail you, which is fine because actually each mail piece is mail fraud at that point. Haha. But I encourage them to mail me but do not call. That’s the specific command you have to give them.

Okay, so whatever it says in the debt validation letters, I forget now, but they wrote back saying, “You told us not to contact you. We’re not gonna contact you.” But yet they continued to try to contact me. They literally actually, at one point, came to my house and left a letter on my front door. So they called 47 times. That’s a violation. That’s the first violation of the TCPA. Each violation is worth a thousand bucks. Yeah, the first one's 500, and everyone after that’s willful is $15,000.

So needless to say, this case is not in small claims court. I did end up having to get help writing the federal complaint. So I have complaints under 15 USC 1681, 47 USC 227, 15 USC 1692, the Rosenthal Act in California, and then 15 USC 1666. The total damages on this complaint are $226,000. And we definitely have them on the TCPA complaint because they acknowledged in writing that they were told not to contact me and they still contacted me.

What I have found with this process, and with specifically with the Fair Credit Reporting Act, is that it has to be a bonafide dispute in order to meet the elements of that particular code section. At one point, when things went south with this, I called them up and I’m like, “Why are you reporting on my credit report negative? I'm not late on my bill.” And they said, “Well, you're not paying the minimum.” And I’m like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I've been paying it.”

So I decided to go and pay off the whole debt because I just didn’t want it to continue to damage my credit. I paid it on the nineteenth of April. They returned the money and notated it on the statement that they were returning it, no stated reason why, and then tacked on another thousand dollars and ninety-six cents. So I called them up. “What happened? I paid this bill off. I don’t understand. Why are you adding more?”

So now we have a Fair Credit Billing Act problem, which basically can get the debt canceled. I started to go into dispute, a full-on dispute, which paying it off and then having them send the money back with no explanation becomes a bonafide dispute. So now I considered taking the FTCPA complaint to small claims.

But what I've heard from people here in California is that you have a good chance of losing in small claims with these debt collector cases. For whatever reason, nobody really knows why, but the small claims court judges tend to not uphold them. So I decided not to do that. These federal complaints are not for the faint of heart.

We took a strategy where we filed in state court first because I can get a fee waiver granted, and it forces their attorneys to take it to federal court if that’s where they want to go. So currently it’s in state, but it’s written like a federal complaint. At some point, what we think is gonna happen is, it’s a $5,000 debt to them at this point.

There’s no way—I mean, what we’re assuming is that we’ve definitely got them on the TCPA. You know, you can’t count your chickens before they hatch in any of this, but we think that they’re gonna have to settle because it doesn’t make sense to even adjudicate anything with that high of damages and really good documentation like I have.

What I have to say to people is make sure that you are saving and documenting it and putting it into a timeline where you go, “Okay, this day I pulled my credit down. Exhibit 1.” Just take your credit report, download it as a PDF, label it Exhibit 1, and just get started building the file. Because if you don’t have these things— I ended up with 40 exhibits.

I have my credit reports, the complaints, the disputes to the credit agencies. I checked my credit 30 days after. I redisputed because that’s another thing—you have to go redispute it. Then I went to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and complained to them. It shows a good faith effort.

I made a good faith effort to pay it. They rejected it. Then I made more good faith efforts to dispute it and resolve it with them, and they never tried to resolve it. They never answered my questions about why I had another thousand dollars added.

So we’re at the point now where we filed it on Friday. This coming Friday, we could start discovery. That’s what’s really great about doing it in state court—within 10 days of filing in California, you can start discovery. The minute you start discovery, now their attorney’s bills are getting racked up. Yep, they’re gonna overcome that $5,000 debt in no time having to even respond to this.

So that’s kind of where we’re at. The one question that I’ve been needing answered and what we kind of came across here was, they’re not a third-party creditor. They’re the original creditor. So it’s common—does that, I mean, to me, in my case, it seemed complicated.

But is this process more for third-party debt collectors? Are they easier? Because I noticed with the third-party debt collector that came along for the medical bills, I knocked them out with three letters.

Yeah, it definitely takes fewer steps. So yes, the answer is once it's— I must tell people, let it get to collections and then deal with it. But you know, you're worried about your credit and all that. I always say it’s very hard to have your—you know, it’s something you need to do anyway. But it’s hard to have it both ways.

Sometimes you just have to let it slide. If you know what you’re doing, you’ll get the repair back to the credit. The credit score will come back. I mean, I’ve had my credit score down to 500 and up to 800. It can be done, but you just have to be willing to be aggressive.

Once it does go to debt collections, it’s so much easier to make them go away. But you're doing the right things. You’re tackling it early. It is more work, as you’re seeing, but you’ve also gotten good at detecting the defect.