Consumer Portfolio Services Keith Smith - recovery agent at CPS I missed the phone ringing from their harassment which started a week before my first payment was due and continued to their premature repoing of my car Irvine, California

I just wanted to point out something to you that you may or may not be aware of. I have a car loan which was initially through another bank. After being with that bank for about 2 years they went out of business and sold ALL loans to CPS. So the fact that you keep saying "why aren't you with a regular bank"...is a little judgemental. Just wanted you to know.

That's absolutely correct. Not only do these people not work with you, they are actively working in every way possible against you from the second they start doing business with you, if you can call it business. Tactics, ranging from legal to illegal are used every day by this company. You can call them for days trying to make a payment, literally for days, and get a message that says "this service is unavailable, try again later." When you finally get through, if you get through, they tell you that you called the wrong number. Even though it is the only number on your bill and online, they have an unlisted number you can call that is the "correct" number, and sometimes you can get through in under an hour. Mail a payment in and kiss that sucker goodbye, if it clears or is even found, it will be after it's due, no matter when it's sent. If you do get someone, it takes them no less than 15 minutes to process a payment, I've timed them and they've never been quicker than that but they have been slower. If you complain or have a dispute, their solution is to hang up on you and make you spend another couple of hours trying to get through, I think that it's a company policy. One employee admitted to me over a recorded phone call that they used to be "real bad", meaning fraudulent, and were trying to turn the company around. I don't believe a word of it, they're as bad as they've ever been. All these tactics are designed to make your payment later and increase your debt. Don't believe me, try to pay off your vehicle. They will try to run a credit card as cash advance, then flat out refuse every form of payment except check which will not be found until they've had it for at least a week, then they hold your title for a couple more weeks just because they can. Fraud, plain and simple.

 As a business owner I deal with hundred's of other companies, and none have ever been worse than this one, or even close.  They shouldn't just be sued, the people who make the policies, the employees that enforce them and especially the board and signifigant owners should be incarcerated for their actions. If a person steals they get arrested but if a company steals they thrive. Time to stop this bullshit, if everyone complained to the CA Attorney General, we might, maybe, just possibly get a response. The worst we can do is try. And to the posters who keep attacking people in the name of capitalism here; you are small minded and probably dishonest. You either get paid to come on here and post (I've met people with that job before) or you really are that stupid. Either way, you contribute nothing to this forum or for that matter the world around you. If I had to guess, I'd say you all rode the short bus when you were young.

Again, lots of collectors in the world.  Most work with folks, contract binding, ownership of said service or item aside.  The threatening, the yelling, the instructing clients to get another job, the refusal of allowing clients to speak to an upper representative, the calling a week or so in advance prior to a bill's due date - These are all things that are inhumane, unnecessary and most importantly not productive, if not counter productive in the long term.  Again.  Folks often end up with these status's because they've never had credit to begin with, not because they are well known negligence habit forming people, the banks don't know the habits and therefore put them in these same groups.  You don't know if this guy already has multiple jobs, or got his wife pregnant and found out they are suddenly having triplets or if a spouse just passed away or a major money making job was lost in the six years or so that the steady payments were taking place.

You are not offering advice, you are passing uninformed, blind and very immature judgement, you don't know this person, who they are, what they do or what they are going through and therefore are not assisting or enlightening anyone or anything in any way.  You are simply being a part of a bigger problem.  You've even gone as far as to make these coy remarks and posts on multiple people's threads.  Do you feel as if you've accomplished what you came here to do?  It's a site designed for people to warn others of ill experiences they've had with companies.  That's what this person's post was about.  You need to take your barking to some chat room where you can belittle all the struggling people in the world with other like minded well off / to do chaps such as yourself where you all can feel bigger after each and every witty post you share with one another.

Wish you the best of blessings Sir, you'll sadly need it.

A free car without making payments.  Sorry, you aren't ENTITLED to that.  Why are you even dealing with these people?  Why are you NOT being financed by a bank and paying a much lower interest rate?  Why?  Because your TRACK RECORD demonstrates paying your bills on time is not a priority for you.  Here we are today. you're not paying them on time either!  You can b***h and moan about their COLLECTIONS activities all you want.  The ONLY thing they want is your money. those payments you promised to pay.  It would be exactly the same with me or anybody else!  There is NO magic pill or magic procedure to silence a bill collector.  The ONLY thing that works is to PAY YOUR BILLS.  If you don't have enough money coming in, then you go out and get some more by working a part time job.  Bitching and moaning about BILL COLLECTORS, looking for technicalities or trying to set up some smoke screen IS NOT GOING TO HELP YOU!  It wouldn't help me either!  What will help you is to go out and get more cash coming in.  When I was stupid and got myself into so much bad debt that it would make your head spin, I worked one full time job and three part time jobs.  None of my creditors "did this" to me...I did it all to myself.  Am I better than you?  Hell no!  If I can do it, you can probably do it better!  The key to it all is DO YOU WANT TO SOLVE THIS??

I have an electrical bill, a mortgage, health insurance, internet, phone, television and many other services the world offers me that I have signed into contract with and have perhaps been behind or needed assistance in.  

These people who are belittling your situation, your life changes that took place in 6 years suggesting second jobs not knowing if you already have two or possibly three jobs like the whole lot of us trying to make ends meet.  These other contract binding companies offering a service are all willing to assist in payment, change payment dates, add additional grace periods or other payment arrangements.

What CPS does differently than all these other applications is call you weeks before your payment is due, more than once a day, will contact you in any means necessary, threaten you, yell, harass you and explain to you that you are not doing enough in your life to pay them along with threats to take your car.  Again all prior to your payment due date regardless of paying on time or not.  Plus if you ever request to speak to a higher up employer they refuse.

No one is disputing the fact that they have a contract, a right and ownership of the vehicle until final payment, the dispute here is their means of receiving payment. 

They have a right to collection activities, but they DON'T have a right to harass complete strangers they traced through my address, which was the case when CPS called a woman I don't even know in my apartment building. She had just gotten a pay as you go phone at WalMart the night before. They also don't have a right to call my employers and be harassing to them, which CPS was. They also called my parents in another state about it. The bottom line is I had it repoed because Keith Smith was pissed I didn't return his millionth call. Why? Because he already had all the info I had to give him.
Face it- people have times of financial difficulty, and asking a car loan company to work with you  in a reasonable fashion isn't to much to ask for. 
You responding to these reports in your superior tone is not being a pillar of maturity either. What did your childhood lack that you are fufilling by defending a bonafide predatory loan company?

You said "I was either 1 or 2 payments behind probably 8 months out of the year, but did always come through. "

But you were almost never current on your payments.  I'm very surprised they waited as long as they did to repo your car.  The fact that you eventually paid does not alter the fact that you were behind most of the time.

This is a very sleazy company but you did enter into a contract with them and they have a right to expect you to adhere to it.

You are using this SUBPRIME loan company because you have a reputation of NOT paying your bills on time (otherwise you'd with a bank).  You have taken that pattern into this loan (what a surprise that is) and now you are complaing of their collections efforts.  I doubt highly they have written into the contract you have a 90 day grace period with regard to payments.  If you are one day late, you are "LATE" and are subject to a repo.  If you cannot make the payments on time, then you need to increase your income, perhaps by working a part time job.  Just being late and doing nothing but complaining about their collections efforts or trying feeblely to think up some nit picking smokescreen issue is nothing more than immature.  No, I don't work for them.