good luck man

just read the thread,that insidearm forum seems really sleazy just looks like sharks feeding on noobs who have no idea what theyre getting into , which is more than enough to make queasy about this business , with that said good luck OP , looking forward to updates .

thanks. and insidearm is like any other forum where people are selling things... there are sharks that are looking to scam everyone, and there are legit people. I've spoken to both types.

Just gonna keep kind of a blog here for anybody paying attention. As of end of business today, we have 3800 collected for the month of October, 2100 collected for the month of November, and about 1000 for the month of December. We need 26kish in October to break even, and if we survive we should be going into November with about 14k or so in postdates, where we may actualy be profitable in our 2nd month. Today was a good day, so I'm excited. However, we've chewed through the best part of our debt, and our client wants us to continue calling 2nd and third times for a few more days before he drops more debt with us, so it should be a little slower til Wednesday night when they drop some more with us.

Def love reading updates. Gl

cool thread, gl

Just thought I'd say I have been, and still am, following this thread with interest, and look forward to further updates.

Good luck!

Nice that you are keeping it updated.

What rate do post-dated cheques come back NSF?

I assume people with debt issues that need to post-date cheques are not doing that well and that this would be a problem.

In my experience it has been around 5% or a little less.

That is a lot lower than I expected.

If someone gives you their checking info it is much more likely to clear than if they give you debit card info. Debit cards decline probably 15-20% of the time when the transaction is post-dated.

Pretty interesting thread. I work at a background screening company and we have something called an "address mover" which tracks any social security number with where it has been used. Sounds a lot like skip tracing. I wonder how did you get a hold of that database?

We had to apply for it, and it was a pretty stringent approval process. First, they did a credit check on me personally. They would have done it on my company, but since my company has been in business less than a year and doesn't have a credit rating yet, I had to pass one. Second, I had to send in about 123343 documents proving I would be using them for what I said I was using them for, including a signed letterhead from my client stating that they were providing me with debt. Then, they sent a 3rd party government approved agency out to my office to make sure that I was complient with all rules and laws, ie. having locking filing cabnits, having password protected computers, and a bunch of other stuff. We use a service called CBC, and our client provides us with a service called TLO. We couldn't qualify for TLO ourselves, because they won't even touch you until you've been open a year, no matter what. So in 11 months, we'll hopefully qualify for TLO ourselves as well.

TLO is great. A lot of the same info LE uses.

This thread got me thinking...

I wonder if someone with a lot of debt could simply track down who owns the debt, buy it, report themselves as having paid in full to credit bureaus, take off their name, and resell the debt downstream. ... of if that would be too complicated and not worth the effort.

They would need the money to buy the debt and I'm sure what you just said is highly regulated/illegal.

What part of this would be illegal? (I'm clueless on the topic)

Isn't that what collection agencies do? People can negotiate to have stuff reported as paid/erased from their credit record? Or is there some provision that disallows individuals to buy their own debt?

I'm not very familiar with this but I believe debt is purchased in bundles of similar debt. I don't think you can buy just one person's debt.

You'd also suffer some serious damage to your credit. If you are going to do that better to just move to a jurisdiction with a ultra short sol period and default.

I'm also not sure what you mean by sell it downstream. Do you mean the rest of the debt you purchased or you actual paid debt. The latter would be fraud. The former the difference between what you got for it and what you paid would likely be more than you saved on having your debt discounted.

It wouldnt be hard for a debtor to know who owns the debt early on, as if its on a citibank credit card, citibank obviously owns the debt, and buying it from them would be paying it off or reaching an agreement to pay it off, discount or not.

While citibank owns the debt, they may place the account for collection with third party debt collectors to see if they can recover any of this. the debt collector never owns the debt in this situation though. Citibank can do this as many times as it wants while owning the debt.

After time, Citibank will probably decide to write it off and try to make a little money on it. they will sell it in a very large portfolio for cents on the dollar to a debt buyer. debt buyer can then collect on its own or place with third party agencies. rinse, repeat what Citibank was doing.

the debtor would really never have an opportunity to buy the debt for cents on the dollar because his account will never be sold as a single account. it will always be in a large portfolio that could be selling for amounts in the 100Ks to even millions.

I ramble.

Yes, I mean you would buy your own debt as part of a larger portfolio.

Let's say you buy a portfolio of 1000 debts - one of which is yours. Then you would check yourself off as paid in full to the credit agencies, and resell the rest of the 999 debts for collections to another debt collector. Supposedly, since you just took one name off the list and didn't use the list at all, you could resell for almost the same price as you bought it for.

That's what I was thinking after seeing this thread, and the other thread from the guy who had credit problems. This could be a clever way to wipe off big debts quickly for cheap...

I imagine its quite difficult to track down the exact company that holds your debt. Also by the time you get its too late, damage to your report has already been done by the original creditor.

DC... I actually wondered that same thing myself. It seems like it should be legal, but I'm not sure that it is. I do know that to buy a package of debt like you are talking about is prohibitively expensive, and if you have the money to buy a package, you wouldn't have outstanding debt to begin with. You also need to qualify to report things to credit agencies, and with outstanding debt I doubt you could qualify. That being said, I collect on what people disparagingly refer to as junk debt. Kato is probably more qualied than me when it comes to credit agency stuff... The balances we collect on are so low and the debtors credit so messed up anyway, it doesn't make sense to report them. For somebody in the debt biz I know very little about credit reporting.

Also, just to stay updated, we have collected 17.5k in our first full week open. It's the beginning of the month so that number is skewed, but out break even point is 26k monthly. We have collected 7.5k set to clear in October alone, so we may actually profit our first month open. People start hitting bonus when we hit 26, so for every 1k we collect after that we prob make 300 or so in profit, but we're way beyond where I thought we'd be at this point. Next week will be slower, as the first week of the month is always best.

On my phone so can't edit my last post... Henry is also correct about it costing more to buy and resell the debt than it would to just pay it. Debt has a chain of title, much like a car. You can see everyone who has ever owned the debt. The less people that owned it, the higher the value. By purchasing it, the value automatically decreases, because the assumption is that it was reworked... Nobody would believe otherwise.

Congrats on a great start. The debt you're currently collecting on a contingency basis has it been worked on before, what kind of debt is it? How did you go about convincing this company to work with considering your a start up?

Also do you use scripts or just shoot from the hip?

Wanna collect a $5k debt owed by some loser in the MSNL Sportsbetting forum?