No, debt isn't 'invalidated' if collectors don't respond to letter in 30 days | Fact check

Chris Mueller, USA TODAY
·4 min read

The claim: Debt is 'invalidated' if collector does not respond to verification letter in 30 days

A March 21 Facebook video (direct link, archive link) shows a woman explaining a way of supposedly getting rid of debt sought by collection agencies.

"So you Google something called a debt verification letter, you send it off, they have 30 days to respond," the woman says. "If they don't respond, it's invalidated."

She then asserts that "most of the time" collection agencies respond by saying, "Sorry, we don't have the information needed to collect this debt, this debt is now invalid." She says credit bureaus then wipe the debt from their records "as if it never existed."

The video was shared more than 15,000 times in five days.

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Our rating: False

A debt is not "invalidated" if a collector does not respond to a verification letter within 30 days. There is no time limit for collectors to respond to such a letter, experts say.

No time limit for collectors responding to verification letters

A consumer can send a debt verification letter to a debt collector to dispute a debt or ask for more information about it. The letter typically includes a request for proof that a debt belongs to the person the collector says it does.

However, a debt is not "invalidated" if the collector fails to respond to such a letter within 30 days, contrary to the video's claim.

There is no set time limit for collectors to respond to verification requests, Raul Cisneros, a spokesperson for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told USA TODAY.

But under federal law, collectors have five days after contacting consumers to provide them with "validation information" about their debt, Cisneros said. That includes the current debt amount, the names of creditors and the contact information for the collector.

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While consumers can dispute a debt at any time, sending a written notice within 30 days of receiving a debt validation letter means the collector has to stop trying to collect "until it sends the consumer verification of the debt," said Jeff Sovern, a consumer law professor at the University of Maryland.

"Once the collector does that, it can resume collecting the debt even if it took the collector longer than 30 days," Sovern said. "If the collector is reporting the debt to credit bureaus, the collector would also have to notify the credit bureaus that the debt is disputed. But the debt still exists."

And disputed debt continues to show up on credit reports, Sovern said, "so not only does the debt still exist, it can still hurt the consumer."

Cisneros said he isn't aware of collectors without the necessary information to collect a debt telling consumers their "debt is now invalid," as the video claims.

If a consumer disputes a debt and the collector can't provide enough information to verify it, the collector will typically reach out to their client – in most cases, the original creditor – to see if they have the necessary information, Cisneros said.

"If they can’t get the necessary information from the creditor, the collector stops its collection efforts and sends the account back to their creditor client," he said. "When the creditor receives such accounts, they may put away such accounts in a 'warehouse' where these accounts don’t get any further collections activities."

USA TODAY reached out to the social media user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: False claim debt 'invalidated' after 30-day time limit | Fact check