Hi,

I am from South Africa and here, the debt collectors are not allowed to access any funds from your account without your knowledge and consent. I am not sure how it works in your country.

I suggest that you check with your bank with regards to their banking policies especially when it comes to who is allowed access to your account and funds. Here, only your bank and the Internal Revenue Service (irs.gov in the US) are allowed access and even then they have to ask permission before taking any funds from the account.

With regards to your debt collector requesting a money order for $9000-00 so that you can get your own money back, this is definately a scam. If you give them the money order, you will never hear from them again and will be $17200-00 out of pocket.

As an ex-police detective, I have dealt with a lot of fraud matters and this sounds like a scam that has been in SA for many years.

I suggest that you query whether the debt collecter, be it an individual or ‘organisation’ is legit or not. This you can do by contacting your Registrar of Companies/Businesses (do not know what it is known by in your country) and querying their practise number or licence number etc. As far as I know, all debt collectors need to be licenced to collect debt or they cannot practise.

If you can find no information what so ever on the debt collector, you are then dealing with a fraudster and I suggest reporting this to your local police department for further investigation.

Like I said above, I do not know how things work in your country and I hope this helps.

If you wish, you can send me more information regarding the matter and I can do a bit of research from this side which might help you more.

Thanks for your advice. My lawyer filed an exemption to the County Sheriff department and there will be a court hearing in the next couple of weeks if they object. Hope my lawyer gets the money back for me at court. The debt collector agency is legitimate. They filed a court order in an attempt to collect debt by suing me and I never showed up then the default judgement was filed against me and this is how it all happened. I guess this is legal in the US if you don’t show up at court. But still… I don’t think this is morally right.

Anyway, I’ll let you know if I get it all back.