1. a lot of companies will give you fake court judgements and papers to scare you into paying
2. they will not show up at your door unless you borrowed money from the Mafia
3. they have little to no power to do anything but to wreck your credit reports
4. they will probably not have any documentation on your account and you can usually get porfolio recovery to fold with a debt validation letter
5. you can shut them up with a nice cease and detest letter where you can sue them for $1,000 if they ever call you again if you send it certified mail return receipt
6. don't sweat collections agencies they have no backbone and no documentation over 90% of the time. If you fight it long enough and get through their run arounds you can get anything removed. ANYTHING 
@distantarray wrote:1. a lot of companies will give you fake court judgements and papers to scare you into paying
2. they will not show up at your door unless you borrowed money from the Mafia
3. they have little to no power to do anything but to wreck your credit reports
4. they will probably not have any documentation on your account and you can usually get porfolio recovery to fold with a debt validation letter
5. you can shut them up with a nice cease and detest letter where you can sue them for $1,000 if they ever call you again if you send it certified mail return receipt
6. don't sweat collections agencies they have no backbone and no documentation over 90% of the time. If you fight it long enough and get through their run arounds you can get anything removed. ANYTHING
I bolded number 5. This isn't wise. If you cease and desist a company, their only recourse to contact you with a lawsuit. So you MUST MUST MUST be sure this debt is not valid, or not within the SOL before you send a cease and desist; regardless of if they are fabricating a current judgment or not.
In addition, I am a little shocked at the cavalierness of your response. Yes, you have a lot of valid points, but it isn't as simple as you make it sound.
Collection compaies can and will sue you. That's much worse than just ruining your credit report.
And I don't really buy your math that 90 percent of collection accounts don't have support documentation. I would venture to say at least 70 percent of my 20+ collection accounts had valid debt validation.
I get what you are saying at, but lets not go overboard on the whole 'CAs are easy to defeat' stance.
-scott
ETA... I do agree with you that ANYTHING can be removed with enough patience, effort, approaches and some well timed luck.
Hello and welcome to the forums.
First off, Portfolio is not a small mom and pop CA. They are a large CA and chances are if they say they've had a judgement entered against you, they probably have. Have you pulled your credit reports? You get a free yearly federally mandated CR from the bureaus. You can find this at www.annualcreditreport.com That way you can see exactly what is on each of your CRs. The next step is to find out where and when this judgement was placed. I totally agree with rockstrscott on this one, you do not want to fire off cease and desist letters until you know "exactly" what is going on.
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I echo Shogun. Pull your credit reports and see what is on there. Since they contact you, your window for a timely DV is ticking. Send them a DV via CMRRR.
If they fail to properly validate they must cease contact.
If they fail to properly validate they must cease contact.
