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by JakaJancar 2018 days ago
I've probably had 10 such cases in the last 5 years: speeding tickets from countries I have not even driven to, medical services double-billed to both my insurance and credit card, ... all $100-300 range.

I'm confident I could probably recover most, but at this amount, I just don't want to deal with it. It's one of those cases where I wish I had a personal assistant. It makes me think there's room for a "consumer debt collector" service with a revenue share model.

2 comments

They do exist but only for certain niches. For example in the case of the european air passenger rights. My partner missed a connection flight by a few minutes and had to wait overnight. On the next day she had to take another two stop flight instead of a direct flight. They gave her a hotel, a taxi and a little voucher for food but this wasn’t enough according to her rights.

There are various only services who go to court for you and will get as much money as they can. You go to their website, enter your flight, they calculate the probability that it was the airlines fault , they show you what you maybe can expect, you give them the permission and then they do everything else. The company takes something like 25% comission and that‘s it. It takes a few minutes. In the end she payed 100-200€ for the return flight and got something like 350€ back via the company.

Made me think if one could find the most unreliable flights, with the worst delay in case of a delay and fly them profitably by going to court all the time.

>It makes me think there's room for a "consumer debt collector" service with a revenue share model.

There was a company called Service that kind of did this. They launched around 2015. You would tell them about a customer service dispute you were having, and they would call the business on your behalf and recover the money you were owed. I used them several times, and they were able to recover money for me without me having to do much except give them the details.

It looked like they had a few million in VC money to blow through because it was free, and there were no minimums on the dispute amount, so it definitely couldn't last. In Feb 2017, they added a 30% commission on recovered money,[0] and then later that year, they pivoted to focus exclusively on disputes with airlines,[1] which it looks like they're still doing.[2]

[0] https://us11.campaign-archive.com/?u=8cdf4d62d0219f237ed96d7...

[1] https://mailchi.mp/dcc5d15901c4/meet-service-20

[2] https://www.getservice.com/