Creditor Advocates Inc Park Nicollet Ave, Prior Lake

Hi Himanshu. Sorry you had a bad experience. Receiving an unexpected bill can be a frustrating experience. Looking deeper into this situation, our records indicate that you received additional information today via email that should have included the date of service. Additionally, detailed documentation was sent in June via USPS mail to your verified address, per your request, and we did not receive a mail return so we assumed you received it. We will mail you this documentation to you again. If you need additional information beyond the documentation included in today's mailing, please contact us regarding your specific needs.

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to complaints and apologize for the bad experience you have received. Collecting on a bad debt can be a frustrating experience for any business owner. To mitigate risk, we log all call attempts into our office and subsequently record all conversations in order to address these types of complaints. Regarding you reaching "out to Creditor Advocates again and again by phone for 6 weeks and kept getting ignored", our call logs indicate a single call from your phone number to our office on 8/7/2017. No other calls were found. The information that we have is that 1) you called in on 8/7/2017 with a question pertaining to the NSF and, according to the call recording, staff was able to provide you with an answer, 2) you sent a derogatory email to our employee on 10/23/2017, and then 3) you left an unfavorable Google Review on 11/3/2017. I was made aware of your email complaint after you left your initial Google review on 11/3/2017 and an email response was sent to you the same day. Our investigation found that you did not reach out “again and again by phone for 6 weeks”. If you feel this is in error, please provide your phone number you called from and dates so we can investigate your claim. Regarding your email complaint, our employee was initially taken aback by your language, in which you stated to her, in part: “I understand that the people who have not paid me have bad credit and don’t pay their bills. … Do your job properly! Your job is to help collect money from dead beats, not send me bills. ... Your job is to collect money from people with bad credit and give it back to the people who are owed the money ... Don’t you agree?", email signed Chris McBride, President, Metro Air 10/23/2017. This is not the typical language we hear coming from our business clients nor within the industry as a whole. It’s viewed as derogatory towards your customers, our industry, and insulting to our employee. To put it simply, this was a first for us from a business client. Our employee was attempting to handle a difficult situation with a business client and wasn't trying to ignore you. After viewing the tone in your email complaint and your subsequent emails, I found that our service was not a good fit for yours, promptly returned the accounts, and offered to remove the amount you owed via email. As mentioned in previous emails, your complaint relating to the account payment NSF was reviewed and determined it was indeed handled properly in accordance with regulations. The inherent reality in every business (and their agencies) is that they must deal with sporadic NSF, charge-backs, identity theft, fraud, theft, etc. Unfortunately, there is no way to avoid these issues and you would have received the same experience at any other agency. Regulations require agencies to post payments the date they are received and remit those amounts even though it may not have cleared yet. This was explained to you on 8/7/2017 during the recorded call and subsequent responses to your email complaint. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Ideally, we would like to wait until after the payment clears, for our client’s sake, but we would be out of compliance with the laws regulating our industry. Regarding the effectiveness of our service, within the first two months of working the four accounts, a recovery rate of over 20% was achieved, which is above the industry average for retail accounts, without generating consumer complaints. Regarding fees, we only request to be compensated based on a percentage of the amount worked and collected. In the end, records showed there was a positive amount collected over fee by a factor of 4+. If you do the math, you’ll find this to be the case. Quite simply, we don’t get paid unless you do. Regarding your internal administrative cost, I couldn’t explain why posting a payment and/or sending a check would exceed $200. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thanks for letting us know about any potential website issues. Our website monitoring logs show 100% up-time for the past 7 days. However, our firewall could have blocked your access. Please call (866) 357-7522 and speak with technical assistance and they should be able to help troubleshoot access issues.

Sorry for the bad experience. Receiving an unexpected bill can be a frustrating experience. Right or wrong, our company is often the recipient of these frustrating moments in one’s life so we humbly request a little bit of understanding when considering the facts in each individual’s situation before passing judgment. Looking deeper into this situation, it appears that the original address eventually resulted in a mail return which may explain why you may have not received the original bill from the creditor nor our subsequent attempts to contact you through the mail. We promptly sent another notice upon receiving an updated address (different street address, city, zip, etc from the original). I’m happy to see that although the new address did not have your apartment number, it was indeed delivered … I would recommend tipping your mail carrier because this isn’t the typical result. When moving, USPS’s Change of Address mail forwarding service is a very popular option to ensure bills are forwarded to the new address and can be done online from the comfort of your home. I agree that the envelopes are overly bland in appearance but this is to comply with consumer statutes. We have follow up mailers with different appearances in the hopes to catch your attention but the appearance on these are also limited for the same reason. I also agree that the voicemail message could be more helpful if they contained more information but unfortunately they must follow a very defined script as determined through the courts. I couldn’t agree with you more that fraudulent robocalls are becoming more than a nuisance … I get these as often as the next person. But if you call our phone number back that’s on your caller ID, I promise you won’t get one of those “disconnected Verizon phone number” messages like those fraudulent callers. Additionally, we use toll-free numbers as these aren’t typically used nearly as often by fraudulent callers as local numbers. Rule-of-thumb for myself: If it’s a toll-free number then pick it up. If calling back and it’s not a disconnected number, then it may be legit. Moreover, there are emerging technologies that we are always exploring (ie - text messaging for initial contact, etc) but unfortunately we’re endlessly waiting on the consumer statutes to catch up with modern technology. These are all issues that our industry as a whole is advocating to lawmakers for change and it’s not uncommon to hear consumers' frustrations firsthand that echo our concerns, as is the situation in your case. Nonetheless, we’ll challenge our compliance department and operations team to see if these are areas where improvements could be made. Records indicate numerous calls and a voicemail were sent to both phones and in one case it appeared we spoke briefly with someone the month prior. In any case, we appreciate your feedback and we will provide it to our team with the challenge of expanding our proactive approach while remaining compliant with consumer statutes. If you would like to discuss further or you have other concerns, please feel free to reach out to discuss with one of our senior management team members during core business hours with your account number. If a senior management team member is not immediately available, please leave a call back number where we could discuss further.

Thank you for sharing your concerns directly with our office. The information provided was very helpful. We've requested the company involved to respond to your concerns and to the documentation provided. We'll share the results of that investigation as soon as its received. In the meantime, we've requested no further reporting on this account. If you have any further questions or concerns, please contact our office at (866) 357-7522 during normal business hours.

Hi Patricia. Sorry to read that you had a bad experience. We do provide refunds. Please call (866) 357-7522 and ask to speak with a supervisor. They will be able to help you track down the payment in question and provide more insight into the reason for the charge. Hope to hear from you soon.