If your bills are adding up and the bill collectors are beginning to bug you, you need to start taking action to protect yourself.
This video goes through the reasons you should win if you get sued for debt and begins the discussion on how to send the right signals to the debt collectors to leave you alone.
If you’re being sued or threatened with suit, the first thing you will have thought about was getting a lawyer. Probably the second thing you thought was that you could not afford one. Lawyers don’t all charge the same, or even the same way, but they are all expensive.
A lawyer with experience, in a medium to large city, will aim to make at least $100 to $300 per hour. It seems impossible, but it’s true, and that will translate into:
Now, not all lawyers will charge that much, but most will – or as much as they can.
What makes it even worse is that very few lawyers are very familiar with the laws involved in defending you. That means they either have to charge you their rates while they learn what to do, eat the costs of learning what they’re doing, or NOT learn what they’re doing. And all of these things have obvious problems for a person needing a lawyer.
So it’s hard to afford a lawyer.
It’s also hard just to find one who does this kind of law. Many of our members have reported that they could not find a lawyer who would take their case at any price. And there aren’t many lawyers who do. Most big cities have a few – it’s hit and miss in small communities. That’s because people can’t afford them for this kind of law, considering what they have to charge, and because most lawyers haven’t actually heard of most of the laws involved – debt defense is NOT standard teaching in law schools.
Lawyers who DO know about debt law know that, if they represent you, they’ll be taking on a case against a lawyer who handles dozens, perhaps hundreds or thousands of these cases at a time, with a staff, documents, and network to support all that. It’s a tough job. It can be done, but the math isn’t real great, so not many lawyers handle debt law defense.
Luckily, you don’t have to have a lawyer for debt defense. In fact, it may even be an advantage to represent yourself. And while it may seem scary, you’ll see that it really isn’t very. Let me explain.
The biggest reason people don’t defend themselves is fear – they’re afraid of having to show up in court, stand up and talk to the judge, talk to a jury… etc.
In fact, most cases of every type never go to trial. Very few do – less than five out of a hundred, perhaps much less than that. If yours DOES go to trial, and for every appearance before a judge, you will be fully prepared. You’ll know much more than the lawyer on the other side – and you’ll know you know, and so, eventually, will the judge. There are a couple of reasons this is so.
America is drowning in debt, and debt cases are filed by the truckload. That means a few things to you.
First, it means that the people filing the suit know very little about the cases before they file them – they just don’t have time. If you talk to the lawyer before a court date, you’ll see someone utterly confident that they’ll win – without having a clue about anything having to do with your case. The lawyer probably will have never even looked at your case.
Second, it means that the companies need to keep lawyer time invested in cases to an absolute minimum. As I say, the lawyers never worry about losing your case – they worry about spending time on it. So they will conduct discovery or other pretrial preparations, if at all, in a standardized way, and they will respond to you in a standardized way. That means you can foresee what they will say and prepare (which we help you do). And it means you can disrupt them if you do things they don’t foresee, and we help with that, too.
Given all that, it means, thirdly, that most debt plaintiffs’ lawyers are not particularly gifted lawyers. They spend all day, every day, doing the equivalent of a bully walking up and down a beach kicking sand on everybody that’s smaller them. That isn’t exactly great conditioning for legal thinking, and most good lawyers regard it as a waste of their talent and don’t want to do it. That means there will be a good chance you’re at least as smart as the lawyer you will see in this case. And you should be a heck of a lot more motivated.
With our help, you will be more knowledgeable, too. The best way to get that help is by joining us as a member.
What if you think you really owe the money? Should you defend yourself? Here’s why you must defend yourself. If you don’t you run the risk of having to pay twice. And if you do defend yourself, you probably won’t have to pay. If that bothers you, give the money to somebody who really needs it.
If you’re being sued by a debt collector, you probably think you owe them the money, although it’s surprising how often people who do NOT owe anybody any money get sued. If that’s you – you still need to fight the case, it won’t go away by itself. But if you actually do owe somebody the money for which you are being sued, you still need to be careful.
And you should still defend yourself as well as you can.
You must make the debt collector prove every part of its case – not only that you owe the money, but that you owe it to them. And exactly how much you supposedly owe. That’s because old debts get sold – often more than once – and if you don’t make the debt collector prove it owns the debt, you may pay the wrong person. And then you might have to pay again if you get sued by the person that actually owns the debt.
In addition, most people who get sued for debts do not owe what the debt collectors are trying to collect. They routinely add fees and interest they should not, and consumer protections agencies and organizations routinely estimate that almost all debt collection suits include extra charges – and many of them are for far more than is owed.
Because of the extremely lax regulation of debt collectors, and the frequent erosion of those regulations that do exist, debt collectors develop many dirty tricks. One of the dirtiest is known as “double-banging.” This is the repeated collection of the same debt by the same debt collector. You may wonder how such a thing is possible, and it would be difficult, no doubt, if these double-bangers didn’t have a couple of things going for them.
One thing that makes double-banging easier is “spoofing.” That’s a technology that allows debt collectors to cause your phone to think the phone call is coming from another number, usually a local exchange. Thus, while your phone tells you the call is from your own telephone area code, it’s actually originating far away. And of course the debt collectors often change their names – not just the people calling, but the companies they’re supposedly representing. So you are receiving a call from a company that already collected from you, and now it is collecting the same debt again under another name. And they don’t necessarily wait till you have paid the debt off the first time, either. In one known case, a debt collector collected the same debt TEN times.
And that was without even suing the victim. They can do that, too.
Ultimately, what makes all this possible is that people let it happen. That is, they get scared, or feel guilty, or get angry… any number of feelings cause you to relax your guard, and then they get you. Instead of requiring them to provide proof, you’re asking how to pay.
And once they get you, you go on a “sucker list.” That’s just what you probably think it is – a list of people who will fall for various scams. Debt collectors sometimes trade these sucker lists to each other, so after one of them has collected as much as possible, they trade your name to another who will do the same thing.
The good news about debt collectors is that they usually CANNOT prove their cases if you make put them to the test. The whole process by which they get these debts is so sloppy and careless that they usually cannot find or obtain the proof that they need to win their case. IF you defend yourself.
Our mission is to protect people from the debt collection process. If you are being sued by debt collectors, or if you are being harassed for money, you need to take action to defend what’s yours. For much more information on defending yourself, go to Fast Track to Debt Defense.
