Unsure of next steps after paying OC

[roxxor]

Long story short, had 2 medical bills from Labcorp go to Radius Global for collections where they sat for about a year as I was unable to pay them at the time. Life got better recently and so of course I made the taboo mistake of paying Labcorp thinking "I'll just dispute the collection once it's paid and they'll have to remove it". Sure enough, all the dispute did was update it on my reports to show as paid, but did not actually remove it.

So I'm debating what would be the best next step for me to try to get it removed. The way I see it, I have a couple options that kind of contradict each other if I have to use a second option down the road:

1. Send GW letters to Labcorp and Radius explaining the situation, and ask for them to kindly remove since it was paid. This pretty much admits that the debt was mine and I would think would preclude me from being able to send a DV letter down the road.

2. Send DV letters to Radius. My debate about this one is that the dispute that it was paid to Labcorp essentially admitted that the debt was mine, and if I go this route and it doesn't work, would that burn them from wanting to be helpful if I later tried the GW letters.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[Brian_Earl_Spilner]

A DV letter isn't going to help you. All it's going to do is get the collection refreshed which will ding you with a recent negative. That's even if they respond, which they have absolutely no reason to. LabCorp is not going to be able to help because they're not the ones reporting it and they can't recall a debt that's already paid. The only thing you can do is to launch a goodwill campaign to get Radius to remove the reporting.

[dragontears]

---

@roxxor wrote:

Long story short, had 2 medical bills from Labcorp go to Radius Global for collections where they sat for about a year as I was unable to pay them at the time. Life got better recently and so of course I made the taboo mistake of paying Labcorp thinking "I'll just dispute the collection once it's paid and they'll have to remove it". Sure enough, all the dispute did was update it on my reports to show as paid, but did not actually remove it.

So I'm debating what would be the best next step for me to try to get it removed. The way I see it, I have a couple options that kind of contradict each other if I have to use a second option down the road:

1. Send GW letters to Labcorp and Radius explaining the situation, and ask for them to kindly remove since it was paid. This pretty much admits that the debt was mine and I would think would preclude me from being able to send a DV letter down the road.

2. Send DV letters to Radius. My debate about this one is that the dispute that it was paid to Labcorp essentially admitted that the debt was mine, and if I go this route and it doesn't work, would that burn them from wanting to be helpful if I later tried the GW letters.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

---

By paying you have admitted that the debt was yours.

With the debt being paid there is no option for debt validation. DV only applies if it is sent within 30 days of you receiving the dunning notice (after the 30 days a CA is free to ignore the DV request). And the only thing a DV does is the CA can't resume debt collection activities until they send validation, in your case, there is no longer an outstanding debt for them to collect.

[OmarGB9]

DV letters do nothing unless sent within 30 days of dunning notice (initial communication). If it's past that, then the CA has no obligation whatsoever to respond. And even when DV is done within the 30 day window, they're still not technically required to respond; they just can't continue collection efforts until they do.