Reply to the fund or the debt-collection company claiming your card debt

Legal basis and things to bear in mind

• The company claiming from you today can only collect from you if it proves that the credit has reached it. Article 1526 of the Código Civil (the Spanish Civil Code) requires an assignment of a credit to carry a certain date in order to take effect against third parties, and that is why the written document demands the contract you signed and the complete chain of sales of the debt, not a mere letter in which they state that they are the new owners.
• Proving the debt is for whoever claims it, not for you. Article 217 of the Ley de Enjuiciamiento Civil (the Spanish Civil Procedure Act) places the burden of proof on the party asserting a fact and takes into account how easily each party can produce evidence: the contract and the history of statements are held by the lender, not by the consumer.
• Replying in writing does not acknowledge the debt. What does acknowledge it is paying something on account, signing an instalment arrangement or admitting it over the phone: article 1973 of the Código Civil provides that any act of acknowledgement of the debt by the debtor interrupts the limitation period, and article 1964.2 sets the general limitation period for personal actions at five years. If you have already paid or signed something, tell us before we draft the written document, because it changes the approach.
• We require them to separate the capital you actually drew down from the interest, the fees and the insurance. Without that breakdown there is no way of checking whether the interest applied is disproportionate for the purposes of the Ley de 23 de julio de 1908 on the nullity of usurious loan contracts, nor of challenging the fees or the linked insurance under articles 80, 82, 85 and 87 of the consolidated text of the Ley General para la Defensa de los Consumidores y Usuarios (Spain's consumer protection act) and of Directive 93/13/EEC.
• Placing on record that you dispute the debt does not by itself erase an entry in a credit blacklist (fichero de morosos). Article 20 of the Ley Orgánica 3/2018 presumes that such processing is lawful where the debt is certain, due and payable and neither its existence nor its amount has been the subject of an administrative or judicial claim, or of a binding dispute-resolution procedure between the parties. What our written document does is give a certain date to that dispute, which is the piece later used to request the restriction of processing under article 18 of the General Data Protection Regulation, both from whoever recorded the entry and from the controller of the file. That request is a separate written document and we handle it too.
• If what you have received comes from a court, the deadline is running and is not extended. In the procedimiento monitorio (order for payment procedure) article 815 of the Ley de Enjuiciamiento Civil gives you twenty days to pay or to oppose in writing, and article 816 warns that, if you do neither one nor the other, enforcement will be ordered against you; other procedures allow fewer days. That reply is already a defence before the court, it is contracted separately and we take it on ourselves: tell us that same day and we treat it as urgent.
• Even if the matter has moved on to the enforcement stage, article 557 of the Ley de Enjuiciamiento Civil allows you to oppose on the ground that the instrument contains unfair terms, so the interest, the fees and the insurance remain open to challenge at that stage as well.
• Before going to court in a civil matter an agreement has to be attempted: article 5 of the Ley Orgánica 1/2025 requires proof of a prior negotiating step on the same subject matter as the dispute. Sending the burofax with acknowledgement of receipt and certification of content places on record the content and the date of that communication, and if the matter ends in a court claim we complete whatever is missing.
• This service requires proof and places your dispute on record, but it does not guarantee that the debt will be annulled or that anything will be refunded to you. If they do not reply, or reply without providing the contract or the chain of assignments, the next step is to claim before the court, and that litigation is contracted separately.