These are tough times, so it’s natural that millions of us have fallen behind in our bills or are still catching up. It’s important to take care of our financial obligations, but it’s just as critical to know your rights about debt collections. Just because you owe money, that’s no reason to tense up each time the phone rings!
For many of us, a cell is our primary phone, so it’s natural that the first place a collections company reaches us is in our purse or pocket. Unfortunately, this also means that they can disrupt our work between 8:00 a.m. and 9:00 p.m., the only hours when they’re permitted to call.
It’s against federal law to call a cell phone to collect a debt, so many companies have changed their applications with text like, “signing this document gives us your express written consent to call you on your cell phone.” Companies without disclaimers like these are not permitted to call your cell phone to collect a debt, but if your debt has been transferred to a collection agency, they may call your cell within certain guidelines.
So, how do you get debt collectors to STOP calling your cell phone?
First and foremost: work out a payment plan and stick to it. If you can negotiate a schedule to repay, it’s in your best interests to do so, as the calls should stop as soon as they start seeing your payments.
Use Mr. Number so your phone will recognize incoming calls from collection agencies. Change your settings to send them direct to VM or pick up/hangup.
Report abusive debt collectors via our app. Take a moment to describe what happened, and your comments appear on our site for others to see.
If you don’t believe you owe money, let them know via Certified Mail within 30 days of receiving your first notice. After they receive your note, a collection agency may only call again after they send you written confirmation that the debt is yours.
Use Certified Mail with Return Receipt to send a written request to stop calling your cell and/or home phone. After a debt collector receives this letter, they may only reply to let you know how or if they intend to proceed with the collections process.
Got a lawyer? Tell them to send all notices to your legal representative.
If debt collectors ignore written communications, keep records of their calls to hold them accountable. You may even be able to collect a cash award if a judge determines that they’ve violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA).
IMPORTANT: if you have a new cell number and you’re receiving collection calls meant for a previous owner, the fastest way to resolve the issue is to go back to the phone company and request a new number. For obvious reasons, debt collectors will be skeptical if you continually insist, “Parker isn’t at this number anymore, and I don’t know how to reach him!”
Finally, if nothing else works, report a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission. Filing a complaint is time-consuming, but it’s the only way to stop abusive debt collectors.
For more information about dealing with debt collectors, visit these sites or watch the video below:
We started Mr. Number to give you back control over your phone. We think you have a right to know who is calling you; that you should control who can text you and when; and that no business should be able to call you without your permission. That’s just the start.
A lot of people seem to agree with us. Almost 3,000,000 of you have signed up for Mr. Number and today we’re excited to announce that Menlo Ventures has invested $3,500,000 in Mr. Number so that we can build out our free service and change the way you make and receive calls and texts.
Shervin Pishevar and DuBose Montgomery, founding partner at Menlo Ventures, have joined our board. Shervin is a serial entrepreneur and an expert in both mobile and social applications. Social Gaming Network, his most recent company, was a pioneer in both markets. Mr. Number is his first board seat at Menlo and we asked him why he chose us:
“I’ve known for a long time that your true social network is not the people that you ‘friend’ or ‘add to circles’, it’s the people that you actually communicate with every day. Real people, real friends really do matter. The team at Mr. Number have figured out how to turn that insight into simple, useful apps that solve real problems for consumers and empower them at the same time to take back control of their communications streams. I am really excited about helping them take this to the next level.”
So what is the next level? We’re not ready to say, but you’ve been telling us loud and clear what you like and don’t like about Mr. Number and we’ve been listening. You’ve asked for more control over texts and picture messages, different outcomes for different callers at different times of day, ditchmail, international caller ID, and translation into half a dozen languages, and above all else you want to see all the existing features of Mr. Number on your iPhone. We hear you loud and clear.
We’ve had a serious outage this morning related to problems at Amazon Web Services (see related story from CNN).
Some features (like Caller ID) are affected and some (like call blocking) are not. We’re doing all we can to restore service and we’re sorry for the inconvenience.
Today we’re making two big announcements. We’ve crossed two million users of our mobile apps and we’ve added a major new feature to Mr. Number.
We launched Caller ID in October 2009 and it quickly became our most popular service with 250,000 users by the following May. That was when we decided to change our name to Mr. Number and focus on helping people to screen their calls and texts. To save you the math, it took 7 months to reach a quarter of a million users; 7 more months to reach one million; and just 4 months after that to reach two million. Thank you!
So far we’ve built our business by helping you to block calls and texts from people and companies that you don’t want to speak to and by figuring out who’s calling you when you don’t recognize the number. For some time we’ve been thinking about how to bring you more calls from the people you actually like.
We all have phones with us all the time, but we seem to call each other less and less. One reason is that you never know a good time to call someone. You may be free, but there’s no way to tell who else is. If you want to call someone in particular, you can send them an email or text, but if you just want to chat you can’t text everyone you know to find out who’s free.
If you use AOL or Yahoo IM, Facebook chat, or Skype, you know the answer to this – it’s called status. All those apps tell you which of your friends are available. But when you make a phone call, you’re dialing blind.
The latest version of Mr. Number brings status to your calls and texts. You can let your friends know when you’re free for a call, when you prefer text, and when you’re tied up. When you need some time Mr. Number can send all your calls to voicemail; your friends will see that you’re out of action and not waste their time. Mr. Number can even let them know when you’re available again.
Now you can get more calls from your friends, block calls from your enemies, and find out who is calling when you don’t recognize the number in the first place, all with one app. More calls when you want them, no calls when you don’t.
The new version of Mr. Number with status is available in Android Market and iTunes today. The BlackBerry version will be out very soon (sorry, we do love you too). For more information, watch our new video!
As Mr. Number continues to grow, we learn more about spam callers. With you all leaving comments and complaints about malicious numbers, we are beginning to get a vivid picture of the culprits. There are so many telemarketers in the world! We see over a thousand new numbers marked as spam every day. With so much traffic we wonder, what numbers are the worst?
To find out, we built a simple leaderboard. How do you climb the ranks? Call thousands of Mr. Number users a day and get them to mark your number as spam. Give them incentive to leave complaints as well. If you reach the top, we’ll award you the “Super Spammer” badge (and block you from calling any Mr. Number user).
You can see the leaderboard here. Take a look! You can see the worst offenders this week and month. Have any of the numbers called you?
We’ve had a few reports of our iPhone app crashing. It took us a while but we finally tracked down the bug and you can upgrade to version 3.05 in the App Store today. The bug only affected people who used Mr. Number to look up area codes as opposed to individual phone numbers. Sorry!
While we’re on the subject, we get a lot of questions about why our iPhone app doesn’t have all the functionality of our Android and BlackBerry versions. We hear you. We’d love to offer call blocking, true caller ID, or at the very least the ability to look up numbers from your recent calls without having to copy and paste them from your call log into Mr. Number. Unfortunately, none of this is possible on the iPhone today without jailbreaking. When Apple gives us APIs to do so, we promise to bring all the features of our Android and BlackBerry apps to iPhone.
We used to offer two ways to screen your calls: Mr. Number Call Block for people that you never want to hear from again and Mr. Number Caller ID to identify mystery callers. But some things belong together, like peanut butter and jelly, Ernie and Bert, or Ozzy Osbourne and Justin Bieber. Call blocking and caller ID are both ways of screening your calls and texts and they belong together in one app.
Our first attempt for BlackBerry devices was an app called Mr. Number Professional. Not surprisingly, you found three apps even more confusing than two, and it didn’t help that we released cool new features like text blocking for one app but not the others. (Sorry.)
Instead we’ve added Caller ID as an option in the latest version of Mr. Number Call Block (1.13). Anyone who downloads the app can try Caller ID for 7 days without having to pay or share data. After 7 days the feature turns off and you can activate it again by subscribing for $1.99 per month or sharing data to get it for free. (Call blocking is always free.)
We’ve also redesigned the app to make it easier to use.
Instead of a separate blacklist and whitelist, the new app has one list of blocking rules and you can add exceptions to any rule. (Yes, this works exactly the same way. But when we offered two separate lists, some users thought they had to add all of their contacts to the whitelist no matter who or what they put on the blacklist.)
We added lots more information to the history and added buttons like call, text, and add to contacts. (If you use Caller ID, all your lookups get saved to the history too.)
We grouped all the custom settings together on one tab, including the on/off switch for call blocking.
We fixed many small bugs and one big one: Mr. Number may have told you that it was blocking texts from private numbers. Oops. It is not possible to send a text message from a private number, so those messages were phantoms. Spooky.
We have ‘retired’ Mr. Number Pro. He’ll keep on working indefinitely, but to get new features please switch to Mr. Number Call Block and Caller ID.
Finally, did Mr. Number stop working for you? On BlackBerry devices, 90% of problems are related to permissions. Strange forces can reset your permissions from time to time. Go to BlackBerry Options (click on the Options or Settings icon). Click on “Applications” and choose Mr. Number. All the permissions should be set to “Allow.”
Thanks for all the great reviews, we’ve got lots more coming soon.
Call blocking is so 2007. Now texting is the default way to share EVERYTHING that is happening. It can be overwhelming. The problem was a topic of conversation on The Office when Darryl said, “There was a time when the only people who texted you were people you wanted to text you.“ Now everyone texts, and often.
We are excited to announce that Mr. Number Call Block now blocks SMS messages in addition to calls. This highly requested feature is available to Android and BlackBerry users. Now you are in control of who can send a text.
To download the application, simply go to the application store on your Android or BlackBerry phone. Thanks for all the suggestions. We love hearing them.
We’ve done a lot of work on our iPhone app since first our first release in December, and we’ve done our best to incorporate all the feedback we’ve gotten from user reviews. Now we’re one of the top 10 best-selling apps in our category (Productivity). Thank you!
We’ve just released a new version of Mr. Number for BlackBerry smartphones in App World. Now you can do reverse lookup of any US number. If you get a call on your home phone or work line that you don’t recognize, or you’re trying to make sense of your phone bill, just fire up Mr. Number. You can type a number by hand or highlight a number in the call log on your phone, press the menu button, and select Mr. Number.
We’ve also changed the prompt that appears after calls from mystery numbers to let you report spam calls. Your reports will show up on our our spam report site and help other members to avoid calls from telemarketers, robodialers, and other telephonic plagues.
We added these features to our Android and iPhone apps a few months ago, so big apologies to BlackBerry fans for the delay. You can find the new version at BlackBerry App World.
We started Mr. Number to give you back control over your phone. We think you have a right to know who is calling you; that you should control who can text you and when; and that no business should be able to call you without your permission. That’s just the start. 
We’ve had a few reports of our iPhone app crashing. It took us a while but we finally tracked down the bug and you can 
We used to offer two ways to screen your calls: Mr. Number Call Block for people that you never want to hear from again and Mr. Number Caller ID to identify mystery callers. But some things belong together, like peanut butter and jelly, Ernie and Bert, or 
