ADT ADT Defender, ADT Protect Your Home bait and switch, wont let me pay bill flint Michigan

Hello Felicia- Thank you for reaching back out. We are sorry to learn of your discontinuance experience. Please be advised that Defenders is not a collection agency for ADT.

Defenders Security INC Protect Your Home is an independently owned and operated retailer of our monitoring services. They sell and install their own alarm equipment, but do not provide a monitoring service. You would have entered into agreement with this party. After the installation of your system, you may not have had any contact with them, if you had no warranty covered system trouble.

Once you cancelled services prematurely, Defenders would have pursued you for the balance of contract. Once an account is cancelled, you have up to 60 days to pay all final balances to prevent the account from going to external collections. Once the account is sent to external collections, you would settle the balance with that party.

If we may be of additional assistance reviewing, please E-Mail us at AlwaysThere@ADT.com. ~Tréchell

A Correction on the math. 

The $50/month would have taken you about 20 months to pay off not 50.  But that is still well beyond what most companies will accept.

Nothing you described here is "Bait and Switch". Companies do not need your permission to transfer service from one dealer to another, and you are being held to the cancellation fee you agreed to when you signed up for their service.

There is NO RipOff here..just the typical "Entitlement" attitude where someone thinks they should be allowed to do anything they want and a company should just bend over and be grateful for getting something. Well the real world doesn't work that way. I think the agent was right, you were doing more talking than listening. As I don't even think you realized what you are writing.

You stated you didn't want to be stuck with them for 3 more years. Yet, you offered them $50/month which would have taken you 50 months to pay off. If you do the math that comes to about 50 months or a little over 4 years. Oh and no if you did do the 50/month it is unlikely that they would have lowered it to $800.

ive never ever heard of a company not taking the money just because im not paying in 1 big sum. so you would rather get no money AND ruin someones credit they have been building? that makes no sense.

Then luckily you have never been in a position like this before. Because companies rarely will accept payments to settle accounts that would extend it out more than a few months, and again remember you wanted to extend the payments for 4 years. As for runing your credit..sorry the only one who is damaging your credit is you. Part of your credit history is how well you fullfill your agreements, not how well you manipulate a company to change the agreement to something else.  You made an agreement that if you cancelled you would pay a cancellation fee, you have failed to do that per the terms of the contract. So any negtive reporting is valid and due to your actions.

By the way you asked who has $400 lying around. Well many people do, but that is not really the point. Because had you started saving the $50/month back in January you would have that now.   Who knows what they would have worked out for you if you said you could pay $400 and then wanted to stretch out the remainder over a few months.

So if you truly want to pay them off and it isn't just "lip service", then starting right now take that $50 and then $50/month and put it aside. When they turn you over to collections you may have quite a lump sum built up. As you may find the bigger the lump sum you can give them up front the more willing they will be to work with you.