Phillips & Cohen Associates Ltd Harasses Bereaved Wilmington Delaware

It is funny reading one of the bottom feeding scum from Phillips & Cohen trying to justify the way he makes a living by trying to misrepresent facts, misstate the law, and generally cheat the public.

Phillips & Cohen narrowly escaped prosecution by the FTC for their unscrupulous tactics by claiming that they were confused by various state laws that in a few cases might allow them to contact relatives other than an estate administrator and that their employees were basically too stupid to be able to understand and follow the law concerning debt collection.

This firm does its best to look like a law firm, and at least some of their clients think that Phillips & Cohen is a law firm.  The reality is that they are not lawyers - in fact that was part of their defense to the FTC supporting their excuse that they found the laws regulating their business too confusing to actually follow.

There are numerous documented cases of Phillips & Cohen illegally harassing various relatives of a deceased trying to get money from anyone they could track down -- and, in at least some cases, they were harassing people who were not even related to the deceased but simply had the same last name and lived in the same city.

Since the bottom feeding scum who posted the so-called rebuttal to my report wants to address my specific situation.  I will give more facts - all debts of the estate were settled promptly after my wife's death over two years ago.  The "debt" that the worthless scum at Phillips & Cohen tried to badger me about was the final balance on a credit card that I had closed when I finally happened to notice that the account was technically in my wife's name.  We each had cards with our own names on them so I never thought about which name was on the account itself.  I paid the card balance in full every month both before and after my wife's death.  Several of our household bills still come in her name and I never bother about that, because I have always paid all our bills every month. 

In this case I had contacted the credit card company to tell them not to send out a card in my wife's name and they pointed out that the account itself was in her name. I told them to go ahead and close that account. I also verified that the balance on the current statement was still the correct final balance. I then wrote a check for that balance and mailed it to the credit card company about three weeks ahead of the due date.  This was on Friday afternoon.

On Monday morning some nitwit at Phillips & Cohen phoned to demand that I pay them an amount that was more than double the balance the credit card company had confirmed on Friday. She also had the nerve to try to tell me that the "debt" was an "overdue balance."  It was obvious that she was doing exactly what she had been trained to do -- trying to confuse a person who she expected to be a distraught widower who had just lost his wife.  If they had called me right after my wife died, their unscrupulous tactics might have worked -- especially if they had gotten of of the children on the phone instead of me.  But in this particular case I had plenty of time to have recovered from the shock of my wife's death and I knew for a fact that the woman on the phone was lying about the balance and lying about it being overdue - so in my circumstance instead of being confused and upset by her lies I was simply annoyed at this attempt to cheat me. 

When I looked online to find more about this Phillips & Cohen, it was clear that this was not an isolated instance of an honest mistake or even one bad employee - this was the way this company operates every day.  They have been investigated by the Federal Trade Commission for violations of the federal laws about debt collection. They have numerous warnings from various state Attorney General offices.  Oddly enough they have an "A+" rating from the Delaware Better Business Bureau simply because most of their victims don't track them back to Wilmington DE and complain to the BBB but when somoene does complain to the BBB, Phillips & Cohen backs off and apologizes promptly to close the complaint. The BBB counts any "closed" complaint as being a good mark for the company!

I am sure that many of the debts that Phillips & Cohen tries to collect are real (unlike my case) but their tactics are unscrupulous at best and illegal in well documented instances.

 In YOUR situation, YOU have the responsibility to pay YOUR WIFES debt. The joy of marrage and such. While it may seem shady to YOU, the reality is that NO BUSINESS should have to take a loss IF there is still a responsible party to manage an estate. So they put in their request to be paid before others, how exactly does this qualify as a ripoff?? If you stop and think for a min. People dying is the biggest ripoff of them all. Youre dead. What are they going to do? Drag your corpse up and sue it?? So before YOU jump on the bandwagon and decry this business, stop and think how much debt is LOST due to people dying. If YOU were running a business, YOU would do the SAME THING!!!! Unfortunatly your loss is jading YOU. Business is NOT about happy warm fuzzy feelings, unless THAT is your business. Normal business, it really doesn't matter if you have died. YOU the entity living or not STILL owe a debt. Its up to the individual businesses if THEY chose to forgive the debt and EAT THE LOSS!!!! Despite what you may think, most businesses DO NOT get to carry insurance for loss. They just have to eat the loss. Which at the end of the day is going to cost jobs. So try and step out of that little grief bubble and realize that YOU are no different then THEY are. YOU wish to be paid for debts owed to YOU. So do they. This is NOT a ripoff. This IS the cost of oweing. Dead or alive, EVERYONE wants whats owed to them.