Charged off account

[Anonymous]

Hi, I need your guys help. I have a charged off account with Merrick Bank reporting on my report with a balance of $1,400. I have no collections open for that account so I assumed that I could call Merrick Bank and paid it off but when I called today they transferred me to another department. The person I spoke with told me they are no longer handling the account and that a third party company is handling my account. I asked the person for the contact information for the collection agency and proceeded to ask him if once I make a payment to the collection agency would they update the status of the account and he informed me that he didn't know becuase they are not Merrick Bank (which its weird becuase I was told I was been transferred to another departmet in Merrick Bank). 

Anyways, I have two questions. First if Merrick Bank already sold the account to a collection agency do they still have the right to report the full balance in the account fo should it reflects 0 balance? Number two, how do I approach this collection agency that has the account? Like I mentioned above, this collection is not reporting on my credit file and I just finiched cleaning up/removing the other collections in my report I really dont want this collecion to show up in my report. I have the funds to pay in full so that is not a problem I just want to know how to approach the situation. 

Thank you in advance for your advice. 

[Anonymous]

I don't know about the Merrick reporting but call the collection agency and ask them if you pay it to not report it to the CRAs. Since it costs the CA's to report thing they will usually agree. But you have to do it before they report because a lot of CA's are a pain to deal with after they report something

[Anonymous]

Accounts can be assigned to a collection agency and until paid the balance would still show. If the account is fully sold then it should update to zero.

[RobertEG]

If the OC sells the debt, then they must update the Current Balance to $0.

However, the amount that they charged-off still remains under the separate reporting code that retains that historical information.

Thus, your credit report will still properly show the amount of the debt at time of charge-off.

However, it is not uncommon for an OC who still owns the debt to refer you to their debt collector, and inform you that they are no longe "handling" the debt.

Some assignments even include the stipulation that all communications and payments must be made via the debt collector,so dont assume that simply because the creditor says they are no longer "handling" the collection on the debt that they no longer own it.