Finding who to pay

[Jeeper44]

I had a judgement in 2005 from Citifinancial. I ignored it for a number of years and its been so long its no longer on my CR. I need to get this cleared up as I am looking for a new mortgage and know this will still show up when they do a public records search as part of the title process. The problem is finding out who actually owns the debt now.

I called Citifinancial and they told me they sold the debt to a company called "Contrax." Apparently Contrax is no longer in business, or at least under that name. A reverse number check on the phone number Citifinancial gave me links to a company called "DHC Business Solutions", which still looks like a CA.

A couple years ago I had a post on here about a shady CA that was trying to collect. A DV letter stopped their actions. A year ago I was contacted by Dynamic Recovery Solutions. Thinking I might get this taken care of finally, I sent them a DV letter first. As soon as they received it I got a letter back stating they were closing my account and returning the debt to the current creditor "International Collection Services." The only reference to this company I can find online appears that its actually owned by Dynamic Recovery Solutions. Now I have no idea if they legally own this debt or not.

I'm trying to give people money but getting fed up at trying to find out who I actually owe.

If you look at this person's Bio there's an interesting link between all the companies involved. Dawn Horst was VP of Collections at Citifinancial, was President of Contrax and now owns DHC. http://www.spoke.com/people/dawn-horst-3e1429c09e597c10035f5fa8

[RobertEG]

Most courts have provision in their rules of civil procedure for direct payment of a judgment to the court if the judgment creditor cannot be located.

The procedure usually requires submission to the court of a showing of adequate measures taken to contact the judgment credtior.

The court will then accept the payment and place it into an escrow account held for the judgment creditor/their heir, and then record the debt as satisfied.

[Jeeper44]

Just an update for anyone who might be interested.

As I mentioned, I contacted Citifinancial and they sold the debt to ConTrax 7 or 8 years ago. Contrax is no longer in business but I found the email to the woman who owned the company and the current company she works for. She used to be a collections manager for Citifinancial so I suspect she took a bunch of accounts with her when opening up her own business. I emailed her and she did confirm they had the debt, but sold it to PCI in 2011 and gave me a contact person.

I emailed PCI and got a response basically the same, yes we had it but we sold it. This time to NorAm Capital Holdings. I emailed this contact but got an autoresponse saying she no longer worked there. I did get another email from someone else at the company saying to give them a call.

This morning I called NorAm. At first she couldn't find any record but then checked their archives and found it. It was sold to International Collection Services. She didn't have a date but said they had a bunch of debt sold 3 or 4 years ago.

Here's the part I can't figure out. I got the letter last year from Dynamic Recovery Solutions after they contacted me out of the blue on my cell phone. I told them to contact me via regular mail which they did. As soon as I got the letter from them, I sent them a DV letter. The response I got back was that they are closing out the account and returning it to ICS. Further research shows that ICS is the same company as Dynamic, so they effectively returned my account to themselves. Unless they've sold it since, it appears they own the debt now and all I requested was proof so I can't understand why they refused. Debt collectors are almost as much of a pain to deal with when you want to talk to them.

I'll look into the suggestion about doing a payment directly to the court. There are problems with that option as I'm sure the court will want full value at once, and I don't have that kind of money available.