Does the 7 year clock restart if an old collection debt is sold to another collection company?

[Anonymous]

Hey everyone, I recently had an old collection account with "Americollect" that has a dofd of 4/2007 and it was removed on 4/2014. I am relieved to have the debt removed my credit reports, but from what I am reading on here, it seems that collection agencies have a sneaky tactic of selling the debt to another collector after the seven year reporting period is up. People have been saying that the same collection debt (which was removed after seven years had passed) was reappearing again on their credit reports with a different collector's name. Could this happen to me whereby Americollect realizes it cannot collect on the debt (since the 7 year reporting period is up) and they try selling the "same debt" to another collector which which would restart the 7 seven year clock all over again? 

[Anonymous]

Yes they DO try to do that sometimes but such 're-aging' of a debt is illegal.

[Anonymous]

If they do that, would I need to have past credit reports showing the actual date of delinquency for a form of proof? But unfortunately I do not have any past copies, only this current year, and this current year's report shows that the collection account has fallen off which would have shown the dofd. 

[yfan]

Any collector reporting the debt to your credit reports is obligated to report the date of original delinquency. You don't need previous credit reports for that. If the new collector is re-aging your account, simply dispute it with the credit bureaus and tell them they are improperly reporting the original delinquency date. They will ask the collectors to verify the debt, including the original date, and if they can't, the credit bureaus will remove it from your report.

[ERoosky99]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Hey everyone, I recently had an old collection account with "Americollect" that has a dofd of 4/2007 and it was removed on 4/2014. I am relieved to have the debt removed my credit reports, but from what I am reading on here, it seems that collection agencies have a sneaky tactic of selling the debt to another collector after the seven year reporting period is up. People have been saying that the same collection debt (which was removed after seven years had passed) was reappearing again on their credit reports with a different collector's name. Could this happen to me whereby Americollect realizes it cannot collect on the debt (since the 7 year reporting period is up) and they try selling the "same debt" to another collector which which would restart the 7 seven year clock all over again? 

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Simply put, there is ONLY ONE DOFD, and it never changes.  If you have proof of the DOFD then you have nothing to worry about.  Any JDB that tries to re-age/reinsert will be forced to remove it!

[RobertEG]

Did you retain any records on the OC account?

All you need is some basis for asserting that the first delinquency on the OC account was prior to 7 years plus 180 days ago.

If a prior debt collector reported a collection, their reported DOFD should still be of record in your file, even though their reporting has now become excluded from credit reports they are now issuing.

With that, you would have reasonable basis for asserting the inaccuracy of any DOFD reported that is less than 7/180 ago.

Any debt collector is required to obtain the DOFD on the OC account and report it to the CRA within 90 days after reporting of their collection, so if the debt collector reporting was more than 90 days ago, the DOFD will be of record in your credit file.

It is the CRA that is required to discontinue inclusion of a collection in credit reports they issue, so the debt collector is not required to "delete" their reporting.

If the dispute determines that the DOFD was more than 7/180 ago, the CRA must exclude.