Quote Originally Posted by CLAUDE G View Post
I don't think they can legally charge you. I think for them to charge you to write up a police report, reguardless if they dispatched or not they would have to disclose to you beforehand that there would be a charge.

That would be like walking into a business and asking for a price quote, and the business handing you a bill at the end for the time it took to give you a price quote eventhough you did not buy.

One could then argue that by imposing a fee, it would then make it less likely for someone to report a crime.

If I where you, I would not pay the fee. Here is what I would do...

#1 Write a certified letter to the collection agency disputing the debt. This puts the collection on hold, until they come up with some reason that its valid.

#2 If the collection continues, get the address of the collection agency and write a letter to the attorney general complaining about Eastpointe and a second letter complaining about the collection agency.

From there, you got the BBB, Department of Justice, Fox 2 Problem solvers, and all the other piss ant goverment agencys for consumer protection. The idea here is you create enough problems with all these other agencys for the city and the collection agency, they end up dropping the matter all together to make the problem go away.

Finally, I would file a lawsuit in small claims court. Usually the next step will be that someone in East Points Legal Department will contact you in a few weeks or right before the court date, and offer to drop the charges if you drop your lawsuit.

Usually Small Claims court will work, and I ended up suing Stub Hub over some bad tickets I purchased from them, and it worked out in my favor exactly as I described above.

I tried the same thing with Chase Bank, and they wanted to be assholes and bump it to district court to force me to hire an attorney. What they didn't figure was that I was an even bigger asshole, and instead of dropping the case, I actually hired an attorney and eventually got them to settle out of court and cost them several thousand dollars in legal fees from their high priced attorneys. I would have been cheaper if they would have settled with me before going to district court.
Wow... Thanks for the sage advice Claude!

Also making a mental note to self.... never cross Claude G....