Is 888-423-0900 calling you?
These calls come from Verizon Collections because their computer has matched your name or cell phone number to a past-due debt on a Verizon account.
Verizon collections calls can be hounding and relentless. Sometimes they don't reach the right person. Sometimes they don't stop when they should. And in some cases, the calls have led to million-dollar legal settlements against Verizon.
In this article, we will give you the playbook you need to turn the tables on Verizon Collections. It starts with understanding who's calling you from 888-423-0900 and ends with a plan to remove a Verizon collection from your credit report if it's truly an error. Follow along to take back control and put the burden on Verizon to prove the debt they're asking you to pay.
Who Is Verizon Collections
Company Profile
- Business Name: Verizon Collections (also known as Verizon Financial Services or Verizon Payment Solutions)
- Parent Company: Verizon Communications Inc.
- Type of Entity: In-house creditor collecting its own debts
- Industry: Telecommunications (wireless, Fios internet and TV, landline)
- Company Size: Large (Fortune 500 #30), 99,600 employees, $138.2 billion in revenue
- Headquarters: New York, NY (operates out of Basking Ridge, NJ)
- Geographic Presence: Nationwide (wireless), Northeast (Fios)
- Better Business Bureau (BBB) Rating: A+ (accredited)
Known Debt Collection Partners
- IC System
- EOS CCA
- Enhanced Recovery Company
- CBE Group
- Convergent Outsourcing
Verizon Collections Harassing Calls
The TCPA: Are Verizon Robocalls Illegal?
If you think you're getting too many calls from 888-423-0900, you're in good company. Verizon has agreed to pay nearly $8 million in TCPA class action settlements for making unlawful debt-collection robocalls.
In Breda v. Cellco Partnership, Verizon settled for $3.95 million to resolve claims covering more than 61,000 consumers who received pre-recorded collection calls despite pressing buttons to signal they were the wrong person.
In Lofton v. Verizon Wireless, a settlement of $4 million involved pre-recorded robocalls made by a third-party debt collector without consent from the recipients.
You're not imagining things, and you're not alone.
Why Is Verizon Collections Calling Me
Why You're Getting Calls from 888-423-0900
The Verizon collections number is calling you because the company thinks you owe money on a Verizon account. Verizon offers a range of telecommunications services, including wireless plans, Fios internet and TV, and landline phone service. Unpaid balances on any of these services can result in calls from 888-423-0900. Common reasons for calls include:
- Unpaid wireless bills
- Overdue Fios internet and TV bills
- Unreturned equipment charges (routers, set-top boxes, etc.)
- Early termination fees (ETFs), which start at $350
- Device payment plans
- Final bills after cancellation of service
When Calls Start Within Days of a Missed Payment
Calls from 888-423-0900 can begin shortly after a missed payment. As one consumer posted on ShouldIAnswer: "Verizon. Calls several times a day. I know my payment is late, get off my back." These calls are designed to prompt you to pay your overdue bill. But what if the calls are for a debt that's not yours at all?
When It's the Wrong Person Getting Calls
Some people getting calls from 888-423-0900 have never been Verizon customers. This can happen for a few reasons, including recycled cell phone numbers, data-entry mistakes, and flawed skip-tracing databases.
One consumer's experience on 800notes: "I got a call from this number on my T-mobile phone, I gave them a fake name, they said I owed $450. I have never had an account with Verizon, ever!"
The same issue appeared in another 800notes review: "They called my elderly mother's cell phone. She doesn't even have, nor has she ever had a Verizon account."
RoboKiller reports more than 622,000 calls from this number in its database, with over 5,000 complaints. As we'll explore in this playbook, there is a way to push back effectively against calls like this for a debt you don't owe.
How to Stop Verizon Collections Calls
Step 1: Get Your Credit Reports
Before you talk to anyone or respond to any call, pull your credit reports. AnnualCreditReport.com offers free access to your Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion credit reports. You can request all three at once or space them out every 120 days to monitor changes over time.
On each report, search for a collection account from Verizon or one of its collection agencies (more on those below). Make note of the following details about the Verizon collection entry on your report:
- Reported balance
- Date of first delinquency (first delinquency date or FDD)
- Name of the collection agency reporting the debt (it might be Verizon directly or a company like IC System or CBE Group)
Why Pulling Your Reports Matters
You might be wondering why pulling your credit reports is your first step. The answer lies in how the credit reporting system works. The process of adding a new negative entry to your credit report does not involve fact-checking.
That means anyone furnishing data to the credit bureaus can report information that may not be accurate or may not belong to you. Balances can be wrong. The reported owner of the account can be incorrect. Even the date the account went delinquent can be off. Every inaccuracy in a credit report entry is leverage for a consumer disputing that entry.
We'll explain exactly how this leverage works in Step 2.
Step 2: File a Written Dispute with the Credit Bureaus
Do not call Verizon Collections to address a collection account on your credit reports. In fact, do not communicate by phone at all. Instead, your next step is a written dispute sent directly to the credit bureaus reporting the Verizon collection.
The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) mandates the credit bureaus investigate every dispute they receive within 30 days. If they cannot verify the disputed information with the data furnisher during those 30 days, the credit bureaus must delete the entry.
This 30-day window is important to your strategy. When you dispute a collection, the credit bureau contacts the collection agency reporting the debt and asks it to verify the account details.
Here's the key point: most of the time, the collection agency cannot fully verify the account. The reason is straightforward. When Verizon places an account with collections, charges it off, and then sells it to a third-party agency, the paperwork often doesn't make the journey with the account.
As a result, when the credit bureau comes to the agency asking for verification of a disputed entry, the agency frequently lacks the documentation to respond adequately within the allotted 30 days.
A well-written dispute letter gives you the power to force the collection agency to verify an account it cannot verify in the time the FCRA allows.
What Happens When You Dispute a Debt
The 30-Day Clock: How a Dispute Gets Resolved
Once you send a dispute to any of the credit bureaus, the clock starts ticking. The collection agency has 30 days to respond with documentation verifying the debt belongs to you, the amount is correct, and the dates are accurate. If the agency fails to meet the deadline or its response includes incomplete verification, the bureau must delete the disputed entry.
A former employee of the Verizon Wireless collections department explained what happens on the company's end: "When we charge off an account and it goes to a third-party collection agency, it initially sits on a spreadsheet of uncollectable balances.... Sometimes the original contract and payment history are lost in the transfer to the third-party agency."
If that sounds like a rare occurrence, consider this. In the course of its collections work, Verizon may use a variety of third-party agencies, as noted earlier. The agency receiving the charged-off account from Verizon typically gets a spreadsheet with basic information: name, balance, maybe a date or two. It usually doesn't get the underlying paperwork, including the original contract signed by the consumer or a detailed history of payments made on the account.
When a consumer disputes a collection account attributed to Verizon, forcing the agency to verify the debt in writing, the agency must reconstruct records it never received in the first place. You're not exploiting a loophole in the system. You're asserting your legal right to ensure every entry on your credit reports is both accurate and verifiable.
Reinsertion: What If a Deleted Entry Comes Back?
In some cases, a credit report entry you disputed and had deleted can reappear. This is known as reinsertion, and it has its own rules under the FCRA. Before a bureau can reinsert a previously deleted entry, it must:
- Notify you within five days that the entry is coming back
- Certify the disputed information has been reverified
If the bureau reinstates an entry without following this process, you can file another dispute. Persistence is to your advantage in this process. The more times you force a collection agency to respond to a dispute about one of its accounts, the more it costs the agency. Eventually, the cost of defending a debt outweighs the amount of the debt itself. At that point, the economic incentive shifts in favor of the consumer. Let's talk about why that's the case.
The Secret to Removing a Verizon Collection
The Problem with Paperwork: Why This Process Often Removes the Entry
Why does the dispute process so often result in removal of the credit report entry? The answer lies in the way debts get passed from the original creditor to a third-party collection agency.
When Verizon charges off an account and places it with a collection agency, the agency typically receives an electronic spreadsheet. On that spreadsheet are the consumer's name, the balance owed, the date of first delinquency, and perhaps some other basic details. But the agency usually does not receive the original contract or the detailed payment history.
The result is a dispute process that places the burden of proof squarely on the collection agency to verify its account. Most of the time, the agency cannot meet that burden within the time allowed.
One EveryCaller user summed up the experience: "I'm 2 days late on paying my Verizon bill.... God only knows how much money they have ripped me off over the years and they are blowing up my phone like I'm a criminal."
When a company as large as Verizon ($138.2 billion in annual revenue) is this aggressive over an account that's only two days past due, something is out of balance. That imbalance is what you can exploit to your advantage in removing an inaccurate or unverifiable Verizon collection from your credit report.
The Economic Reality: Why It Costs Too Much to Fight Your Dispute
Collecting debts is a low-margin business. That means every time a collection agency must respond to a dispute, it costs the agency money. If the agency must file a lawsuit, defend a lawsuit, or engage in additional communication to validate a debt, those activities also carry a cost.
On a typical Verizon collection balance of a few hundred dollars, the cost of disputing the debt several times can exceed the actual balance of the debt. At that point, the math no longer works for the collection agency. Continuing to fight costs more than the debt is worth. Here's how you can protect yourself going forward to prevent the same issue from arising again in the future.
Protecting Your Credit Going Forward
Preventing the Next Dispute: Autopay and Confirmations
Now that you have a plan to deal with the current Verizon collection entry on your credit report, let's talk about how to prevent a similar issue from happening again.
The best way to prevent unexpected collection accounts is to ensure you never miss a payment. Set up autopay for any Verizon accounts you currently have. If you cancel an account, confirm in writing with Verizon that your final bill is paid in full and that you do not owe charges for any equipment. Keep a copy of that confirmation for your records.
It's especially important to confirm equipment charges are paid. According to Verizon's customer agreement, the company can charge a collection fee of up to 18% of any past-due balance if it places an account with a third-party collection agency. So if you have a small charge on a final bill you don't realize you owe, that charge can quickly balloon into a much larger collection account a few months later.
But prevention is only part of the solution, and it should only come after you have addressed the immediate problem.
Put It in Writing: Why You Should Never Call Verizon Again
All of your communication going forward should be in writing. Written communication provides a paper trail that phone calls do not. Keep a copy of every letter you send and every response you receive from a credit bureau or collection agency. Each of those letters is a piece of evidence you may be able to use later if needed.
If you continue to get calls from 888-423-0900 after you've disputed a debt, each of those calls strengthens your case under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which allows between $500 and $1,500 in statutory damages per violating call.
Now it's time to take action based on what you've learned.
Take the Next Step
Removing a Verizon Collection from Your Credit Report
Every day a disputed Verizon collection remains on your credit report, it could be holding you back. You might have trouble qualifying for a loan or credit card. You might have trouble getting approved to rent a house or apartment. You might even have trouble getting a job.
The calls from 888-423-0900 are trying to control your behavior and prompt you to pay a debt that may not even be yours. This playbook has given you the tools to change that dynamic and put the burden back on Verizon to prove you owe the debt it's demanding you pay.
So what's your next step?
- Pull your credit reports and identify the Verizon collection entry
- Identify the inaccuracies in the entry
- Dispute the Verizon collection in writing with each of the credit bureaus reporting it
- Force Verizon to verify the debt with documentation it may not have
If you're not sure how to get started or if you'd like help along the way, we can assist you.
At FightCollections.com, we specialize in representing consumers in their credit report disputes against collection agencies, including Verizon Collections. We know the rules, the timelines, and the leverage points that make this process successful for consumers.
You don't have to go it alone. The system is designed to work in your favor if you understand how to work it. We're here to help you make that happen.
