Here is my situation, I opened a web hosting account with a company in January 2009, and paid up front for 1 year of web hosting. I did not wish to renew my account, and the credit card I paid for the site had expired over the course of the year. But, the company has an automatic renewal policy, so in January 2010 they had tried to charge my credit card for another year of web hosting (.95). Since the card was expired, they could not charge the account I had on file. So what they did was take my site offline, and send a .95 bill to a collections agency to cover the next year of web hosting. Only my site was taken offline, so they are not providing me the service they are trying to collect payment for. So now I have this collections agency trying to get me to pay them .95 for services that were not provided to me. I sent a dispute to the collections agency, yet they still maintain I owe them this money. Is there any way to get them off my back without paying this bill? Obviously I don’t want this on my credit report, it hasn’t shown up yet.
I bet the contract for that web hosting indicated that you had to provide written notice if you didn’t renew. Did you make any attempt to notify them you didn’t plan to renew?
You really have to fight it out with the original creditor as to whether this is a legit bill or not. The debt was assigned or sold to the collection agency. Arguing contract terms with them wont’ do you any good.
If you want to make the collection agency stop calling, send them a certified, return receipt letter telling them to stop all contact. Indicate that the debt is not valid. They have to stop. They might sue and you could argue the contract in court. Or more likely they would send the debt back to the original creditor (if just assigned to them) or sell to another collection agency (if they own the debt),
If the collection agency already has the debt, it probably is already on your credit report. The good news is that the new FICO formula doesn’t count this kind of debt under $100. The bad news is that creditors would still see it on your credit report and some of the larger financial institutions haven’t converted to the new formula yet.