@SahmIam wrote:
@Laura14 No, it's her debt. She used her credit card to pay for food, medical supplies, to pay OTHER bills when her husband was too sick to work.
Not that it matters because it's a debt in the eyes of the law. Last payment was 2006.
If the last payment was that many years ago - she doesn't have to make any more payments.
The original debtor wrote it off years ago and somehow the debt ended up with a collection agency.
My mother died penniless and in debt with medical bills - my aunt paid the medical bills (they had the same doctors). Many years after my mother passed, a collection agency called me at home on a Sunday night and told me she owed Sears $3,000.
I explained to the women (who said she was with a law firm) that was my mother, her estate had been settled years before and she died broke. The lawyer who had handled her estate had called the people she owed and it was all written off at the time of her death.
The woman tried to tell me that to "honor my mother" I should pay the bill anyway...and did I want my mother's credit rating to be ruined????
She was obviously pulling anything she could out of her hat.
These collectors are unscrupulous.
There was a book written a few years ago about the collection business in my city -
"Bad Paper: Chasing Debt from Wall Street to the Underworld" by Jake Halpern. It was a VERY interesting read - and HBO optioned it into a series.