One day while talking to my mother, she said that I had some mail at her house. Surprised, because I had not received mail there in 10 years, I told her to open the envelope. She jokingly said that it probably was a bill collector and I responded by saying that it better not be because I had recently retreived a copy of my credit report and paid everything delinquent off.
Guess what? Yours truly were threatening a judgement if I did not come up with $2400 for a credit card that I had had through Capital One back in 1997 while I was attending college. Naturally, I was worried to death because I am trying to purchase a house. I contacted the company and to my dismay, they were extremely polite. I honestly thought that I had paid this debt some years ago through settlement and explained this to the representative. She responded that she knew exactly what had happened... The person who had taken my payment as settlement had actually taken it as payment on the account and not a settlement. She then went on to say that we could go ahead and settle the account for $1200. I politely told her that I believed that they were mistaken and that I was not paying without doing some research because something did not sound right. I pretty much was alarmed because I knew I had paid everything dilinquent on my credit and they did not even appear... Not even the original creditor Capital One.
I got home and began tearing my house apart looking for proof that I had paid this account. I found an old credit report which showed the account through Capital One as opening in 1997 and the last date of activity in 1998. I became even more worried because I realized that I had totally forgotten about this card and had not paid off this account and I began researching and read about the "statute of limitations." In the state of Virginia the statute of limitations, worst case scenario, on this type of debt is 5 years. I am definitely not the type to try to wiggle out of debt. And I probably would have tried to pay these a-holes off. However, if I could find out that the statute of limitations was out, I am almost positive that they already knew. These people are trained to specialize in this type of thing. This made me think that they clearly could care less about the law and were basically trying to illegally scare or trick me into an unnecessary payment to try to "settle" this account that didn't even appear on my credit report anymore. This would have only given them the leeway that they needed to restart the statute of limitation and haul my behind to court. I was literally in awe when I saw the exact same company on this website. I felt so victimized and initially, I was so nieve to think that they could not be a ripoff. Thank God I was smart enough not to try to make payment arrangements with them and I did my research, because I had no idea about the statute of limitations. I plan to tell them to stop contacting me.
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