Help on approaching questionable collection.

[Anonymous]

When our family lived in Kansas we had cable and internet through CenturyLink for around a year and a half. My husband was in the military. We ended up moving on post due to my husband having to go out of state for training and scheduled to deploy afterwards and I felt like I would feel more safe on base with 2 kids by myself.
I'm pretty sure he signed up for a month to month service because we didn't want a contract. There weren't suppose to be any cancelation fees if he cancelled. If they would have offered CenturyLink on post, we would have kept it.
I know we went a week without tv before moving. I personally took the equipment back a week after cancelling and the lady said we were good.
How do I go about getting the collection agency to prove we owe this? How do I prove we don't? We definitely do not have CenturyLink records from back then anymore. I could probably get bank statements but have no billing statements to compare it with. I would love to see a statement showing what exactly the bill is for, seeing how we have no clue.

I actually just thought of something. If it were debt my husband owed in 2011 it should have been included in his BK in 2012. The only reason I can think it wasn't, is because he never received a bill until after complete discharge. That would have been almost a year after we cancelled CenturyLink.

Please help on what we should do and where to start.

[RobertEG]

You can send a request for debt validation to the debt collector, but that wont require that they prove the debt.

A DV request, provided it is timely, meaning sent either prior to a dunning notice or within 30 days after receipt of a dunning notice, imposes a cease collection bar on the debt collector, which remains in effect until the debt collector has first sent the requested verification.  They can choose to cease futher active collection activities, and not send any verification.

To compel proof, you can bring your own civil action, which then provides the plaintiff the ability to compel the production of relevance evidence through the court pre-trial discovery process.  Bringing civil action requires the consumer to provide some basis for an assertion of debt not mine, and thus has an initial burden of showing a reasonable basis for the civil action.  A simple suspicion is not adequate basis for supporting a civil action.

Trashing your own records is never a good idea.