Brief history:
I live in Connecticut. I have about 5 credit cards that I have used over the past 3-5 years to start my home business and pay for schooling. They are in my name only and my husband doesn't know about them or the massive debt that I have.
Business has been up and down and I ended up maxing out the cards - total as of today - about $34K.
Up until the past 8 months I was doing pretty good at making at least the min. payments on all the cards. Most times over the min. payments.
This past year, things have been very slow and I have had numerous late/missed payments.
I have worked out a payment plans with 2 of the creditors. Those have been going OK.
With one of my accounts (Citibank - $5k) I was bullied by a collections dept. (not theirs, I researched tonight) into paying a huge "good faith' payment - I couldn't afford it but they kept insisting that they would take it from me based on the fact that I had one other credit card account in my name that had a balance to cover it. (This other CC is one that is used by both my husband and me for groceries only and is paid off every month.) This happened before I found this forum and found out that it wasn't legal - don't know what my recourse is regarding that, but I'll save it for another post.
My biggest worry is this: I have a Capital One account($5k balance) that I have tried talking to regarding setting up some kind of debt payment/lower interest plan (like I worked out with the other 2 creditors) but the number they keep sending me to is in overseas collection department and no one there will redirect me to some one in a department that can make the agreement with me. All they will allow me to do is set up a regular payment. I have since stopped paying the bills - it has been 6 months now.
Well on Friday at 7:55pm EST, I get a call from someone (sounds overseas with a heavy Indian accent) telling me that my account is in severe trouble and they will be filing a lawsuit on Monday if I can't discuss setting up a settlement with them. He also asked if I had received the paperwork in the mail. I haven't received anything from the company, and I haven't even received my statements every month since I started with the late payments.
Well, I'm in the middle of putting my 3 young boys to bed, so I tell him I can't discuss it now. He said to call him back on Monday between 10:30 - noon EST or else the paperwork is going to be filed.
Now from what I have read here (I have spent the last 4 hours reading as many posts that are relevant to this situation here as I can!), they should have sent me something via mail about 30 days ago before filing a lawsuit. Am I correct in this?
I am really pi**** that they would call me on a Friday night and tell me that on Monday they will be filing a lawsuit... Sounds to me like a scare tactic that they are trying to get a payoff from me without giving me time to find out what was going on.
Anyways, I also ran a credit report tonight to see what the status of my accounts were - with this account in question, the status is "Charged off as Bad Debt" it also states Date Closed: 11/2007.
So how could this collection company have even had the time to send me 30 days written notice of a pending lawsuit regarding this account if it was just closed and charged off within the past 9 days? (Called me 10 min earlier on my business phonenumber according to my voicemail and left a message - his name wasn't clear and the company he mentioned was called "Global", 'yeah, that was all he said' left a phonenumber and a case number- he actually reached me on my home number which I had told the company to remove from my account last year!)
Is this company just blowing smoke? What should I do when I need to call them in the morning? Should I ask about the written notice and also refer to the FDCPA rules that they broke?
Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

