Complaint Review: NCO Financial Systems - Horsham Pennsylvania

Unless you are well spoken, and very confident in your knowledge of the collection process I would avoid speaking to them.

Traditionally, NCO has had suit filed for abusive practices and intimidating people into providing personal identifiable information they are not entitiled to making their personal situation worse.

As far as the phone calls, I would write to their compliance manager Lisa Signore.  Her direct email can be found on the Better Business Bureau website.  Inform them you want all telephone calls to be discontinued immediately and demand they communicate with you in writing as to the purpose of their harassing phone calls. 

It is illegal for them to phish for personal information such as your DOB and SSN.  They are very easily able to bring up the account information by the telephone number they are calling.

Pull your credit reports.  This may give you a clue.  NCO is notorious for putting information on the credit report.  By law, if NCO reports a collection they have to state who the original creditor is and the dollar amount.

If the trade line is not reported, escalate your dispute to the BBB and the PA Attorney General solely on harassing phone calls and their illegal phishing for personal information.

If the trade line is reported, contact the original creditor to see if the account is yours, if NCO is legally contracted to collect.  If you do owe the bill - PAY THE ORIGINAL CREDITOR and not NCO.  NCO has been sued for illegally pulling funds from consumer acocunts without their persmission.  You don't want NCO getting your personal information.  If you must pay NCO direct and there is no way around it, use a money order to protect your personal information.

It's a process to sort this out, but your first step is getting the details.

They can just start calling you out of the blue, but do not have to send you anything until you speak with them. I'm assuming from your post, that you have NEVER talked to them about this debt?

The law states that a debt collector has 5 days from initial contact to mail you a letter about the debt. Notice this says initial contact. Since you are ignoring the phone calls, they have not had initial contact. As for the personal information, they already have all of your personal information. They are asking you to verify it.

here is how you get the calls to stop:

Call them or accept one of the phone calls. Verify your identity. Tell them that you will not discuss the debt until you receive a demand letter from their company. This needs to be fax, email, or written. They have 5 days to get this letter to you or the debt is considered invalid. Once you have received the demand letter, you will need to type up a debt validation letter. This is to ask NCO to provide supporting documentation that you do owe the debt. This step is crucial, if they cannot prove that you owe the debt then it is invalid. They have 30 days to mail you debt validation. Make sure your request is mailed certified mail.

if they do all of this and can provide evidence, then you owe them the money. Under the law they cannot call you more than once a day. This once a day only counts if they speak with you. If you ignore their phone call then they can call you as many times as they wish.

Once you have done all of this, if you really wish to ignore the debt you will need to mail a cease and desist letter to the company, again via certified mail. What this letter will do will make them stop calling you. The only way they can contact you from that point forward is via mail. This will not make the debt go away. This will not stop them from suing you for the debt. It will just make the phone calls stop.

Until you attempt to speak with them about this debt, the phone calls will continue and there is nothing you can do to stop them.