Asset Acceptance & Rights to Validation

[CarlyK82]

I submitted a complaint to the BBB and it was closed, although I never responded in time (my fault). However, I have a question that struck me as odd in their response to my situation...they admit sending the inital contact in May 2012 to the wrong address (and seeing as they soft my credit report frequently, they would have known what my address was) and because of this, all of my rights to request & receive validation have expired. 

Secondly, they are stating that there was a payment made to this account in 2009, however, I NEVER made any sort of payment, so where they are getting that from is beyond me. 

My question is this...because I never received a letter to my appropriate mailing address, is my right to validation expired? I understand that with most, if you do not repond to the first contact within 30 days, they don't have to validate, but I never got anything & they admitted the address was wrong. So what the heck? 

[RobertEG]

Unfortunately, FDCPA 809(a) does not define appropriate address requirements for dunning notice.

When any statute is non-specific or open to interpretation, a reasonable standard is applied.

There are, in my opinion, two reasonable alternatives.

First is use of the mailing address of record with the CRA, and thus obtainable by a pull of your CR.

Second is the current address of record that the consumer has provided to the original/current creditor or debt collector for their business dealings with the consumer.

The second alternative would, in my opinion, be the more reasonable, as a party should not be required to pull a consumer's credit report in order to communicate with them.

The advisement of contact address provided to the creditor, and thus available to the debt collector, would be the more reasonable.

Were the creditor or debt collector ever advised on a change of address?

As for losing the right to debt validation based on expiration of the 30-day period set in a dunning notice, that is not quite the way it works.

A consumer never has a right to debt validation.  They have the right to require a debt collector to cease active collection on the debt until they have provided the requested validation,  if they send the request for debt validation either prior to any dunning notice, or within 30-days of dunning notice, the debt collector can choose to accept the cease collection bar and never provide debt validation.

Additionally, a consumer is not precluded from still requesting debt validation, even though the request is untimely.

However, it imposes no cease collection bar, and thus the debt collector can continue business as usual without first providing the requested validation.

Send the DV, and hope they still respond as a prudent business practice. 

Timeliness of the DV won't become an issue unless the debt collector resumes collection without first providing validation, leaving it to the consumer to then raise the issue of their violation of what they consider to be a timely cease collection bar.

[CarlyK82]

Thanks Robert for your help with that question...

The OC did have my address correct and somewhere along the lines between the OC & AA, it got messed up. It has always been updated and correct with the OC. While updated to the same address on all 3 credit reports, which AA soft pulls 1-2 times monthly, I never updated with the debt collector and they didn't decide to pop up on my credit report until recently.