Long story short, I cancelled DirecTv over a year ago. About 8 months later I started getting calls from a collection agency that they use claiming I owed $160. They couldn't match my SSN but had the right address (they were a legit company that DTV uses). I called DTV and verified the debt, but they couldn't explain why there was a discrepency in SSN on file with the collection agency. Until that got cleared up I refused to pay it off. I called the collection agency and confirmed that the past due amount would not get reported to the credit agencies. They said the debt was too small to report.
If you're wondering about the 8 month gap, my town flooded in that timeframe...when I say flooded, I mean 95% was under water for 2 days. Needless to say postal service was disrupted for a couple of months.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed my score fell about 60 points ( I use Discover's score monitoring tool), upon further investigation another collection company had apparently taken over the account and immediately reported it. It was only showing up under Equifax and Transuion. I filed a dispute with both. As of this morning, both had emailed me and said they had deleted the record from my history.
My questions:
Can this company re-report the debt to the credit agencies?
Will it eventually show up under Experian?
Should I call DirecTV and pay off the bill just to be safe? If I go this route, will this end the cycle from the new collection agency? I was not wanting to do this as I don't believe the debt is valid, but if it saves me the credit headache then ok.
