Fdcpa Laws

Fdcpa Laws

Bill collectors will harass, threaten and intimidate you to get you to pay. It doesn’t matter to them if they break the FDCPA laws to do so. They are betting that you do not know your rights as a consumer. On March 20, 1978 the Consumer Credit Protection Act of the United States was expanded to include debt collection practices. Congress designed and wrote this act to clean up abusive, unfair and deceptive debt collection practices used by unethical agencies.This law called the Fair Debt Collection Practice Act was designed to protect you, the consumer. It is important to understand these FDCPA laws do not protect you from the original creditor you owe such as your bank or credit card companies. Your original creditors and their subsidiaries can legally make collection calls to try and settle your debt with them. If you receive harassing and threatening calls from your creditors, this would be a civil matter and would have to be settled in civil courts.

Usually, how this collection process works, is your original creditor will try to settle with you personally in the first few months after non-payment even up to a few years. After this time they can legally sell your debt to a junk debt buyer or a collection agency for pennies on the dollar. This way the creditor can recover some of their loss by selling your debt and then write the balance off as a bad debt. Once your debt is sold, the collection process starts all over again. This new owner of your debt is a third-party debt collector who wants to settle your debt. You are now protected under the FDCPA laws. This includes protection from any collection agency or law firm trying to collect a debt. If they are not an employee or subsidiary of your original creditor they are a debt collector or a debt collection agency.

You are now protected under the federal and state laws so if you receive any type of harassing phone calls or letters you can sue the debt collectors for fdcpa violations of 1000.00 per violation.