Their initial communication with you triggered their requirement to have sent you formal dunning notice with 5 days thereafter, providing you the name of the current owner of the debt, and advising you of your DV rights. Thus, you may have a side-issue of their lack of compliance with their dunning notice requirement.
Ragardless, I would not necessarily recommend sending a DV. It depends upon your cirsumstances and needs.
Any DV you send at this point would apparently be timely (i.e., sent either prior to any dunning notice, or within 30 days of receipt of dunning notice), and thus will impose an automatic cease collection bar on them until such time as they chosse to provide the requested debt valiation.
That will temporarily block their reporting to the CRA, but they can, at any time, send verification, and immediately report their collection.
It will also block their ability to negotiate any terms of payment of the debt, such as pay for not reporting offer.
You will thus be in limbo, as you cannot negotiate anything with them until they first provide verification, thus removing the cease collection activity bar.
An option, if you dont contest the validity of the debt itself, would be to offer payment now in exchange for their agreement not to report their collection.
As for pursing collection on the debt without having reported to a CRA, that is their option.
Perhaps they plan to use reporting as a tactic to apply pressure to pay, in which case they may have anticiipated a pay for not reporting offer.
Or perhaps they are concerned about having to delete their prior reproting as a condition for payment of the debt, which is contrary to CRA policy.
By having no reporting to agree to delete, they avoid any possible issue of violating their credit reporting agrerment with the CRA.
