SUED BY A DEBT COLLECTOR?

Here's a secret that debt collectors don't want you to know when so you get that official looking envelope in the mail. It's a court summons. The goal is to scare you into paying right away or getting you to not show up to court so they automatically win. But you're not gonna do either. Force them into arbitration. Here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna file your answer, and then you're immediately gonna file a motion to compel arbitration to beat them at their own game. Almost every credit card agreement has what they call an arbitration clause. And you can use this to your advantage. And that's when it gets good for you. First, to start the arbitration process, it costs a hefty fee up front. We're talking thousands of dollars. Suddenly, they're not that interested in taking you to court or going into arbitration that the debt that they're trying to collect just doesn't look as profitable. Second, they can't just hire any old representative. They need to hire an arbitration lawyer to take over. That adds even more fees to the costly process of arbitration for them. This makes it way less likely that they're gonna wanna proceed. Also, and this is the big one, they usually don't have any documentation to back up their claims. They can't prove you owe the they can't prove how the debt was calculated, and they can't prove the chain of assignment from the original creditor to them. So by forcing arbitration, by making it so expensive and difficult, they usually wanna just drop the case all together. And then you win.