debt in 1995 with my ex
Question: when I got divorced in 1995, it was clearly stated in judgment of divorce that he was to assume all responsibility of Discover card bill. I got served a week ago on this credit card debt since we had a joint account. Based on SOL, I should not be responsible for this debt? I am supposed to reply to this claim within 14 days and am planning to do so by stating about SOL and Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. Should this case be dismissed? Thanks for your help.

Answer: It makes absolutely no difference what happened in your divorce settlement or final decree. That is irrelevant here and you need to forget about that when dealing with this case. The divorce decree is an agreement between the court, yourself and your ex husband and nobody else. So forget about that.

You will get nowhere trying to argue that they broke federal law in your local court. The local court is interested in hearing about only one matter and that is whether or not you owe the debt the plaintiff claims you owe. Little else matters in the local court. Yes, you could counter sue for their violations but that normally falls on deaf ears.
So forget about that too. At least for the time being.

Your thinking on SOL is absolutely correct however. That is your winning argument. Prove that the debt is outside of SOL and you will win. Then you should take them to federal court and spank them hard for violating your rights under the law. What they did was to misrepresent the legal status of the debt at the very least if not more.

It isn't even difficult to file a case in federal court. Take the case of Mark from Rhode Island for instance. When Mark first because a student he was in serious trouble. He got sued by Capital One Bank for a credit card debt. Needless to say, he lost in local court and they got a judgment against him. While all the exact details are not available they are pretty easy to piece together.

In the local cour the law firm of Howard Lee Schiff P.C. presented an affidavit from a Mr. Dudley Turner of Georgia. Of course Mr. Turner swore that he knew all about the debt Mark owed.

We knew that Cap 1 don't have offices in Georgia so we knew we were looking at a false and phony affidavit just for starters. After a bit of investigation we found that Mr. Turner actually worked for a collection agency known as TSYS which has a subsidiary company known as the National Attorney's network or NAN. So does the notary public who notarized the false affidavit.

The funny part was that the law firm of Howard Lee Schiff P.C. does not have offices in Georgia either. So the logical deduction has to be that Capital One hired TSYS to collect the debt who then hired Schiff through it's National Attorney Network (NAN) and it was then obvious that TSYS had furnished Schiff with the false affidavit. Shiff filed it in Mark's local court without doing his due diligence to assure that the affidavit was valid and not phony. That Turner actually did have first hand knowledge of the debt as he claimed he had.

So Mark filed a federal lawsuit against both Schiff and TSYS. The dumb antics used by Schiff in their futile attempt to beat Mark were absolutely hilarious and we took full advantage of every one of them. The result is that both defendants now want to settle out of court and are very fearful of having to defend against Mark's accusations.
They want no part of that. Mark tells about their nice offer to pay off the debt for him, vacate the judgment and take it off his credit reports and give him a nice settlement check on top of that. Mark has some other similiar problems and he will get rid of them the same way he gets rid of this one and the outcomes will all be the same or very similiar.

If you properly prepare and present your SOL defense in local court you should win easily provided you can prove your point. That shouldn't be hard to do. You won't need a lawyer because just like Mark, you can learn how to do it without a lawyer.

Mark tells his story in the audio file below.

Bill Bauer
405-684-9297
405-227-9423

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