<prompt> Human: Brief personal background: Please forgive my ignorance on the subject - financial discussions in general overwhelm me. Im 26 and working retail and have a shitty BFA.The only awareness I have about my credit score and debts come from credit karma and the student loan website. I have some outstanding medical bills that need tending to and appear to be responsible for my shit credit. However, it seems that my medical debts of which there are 3 were sold off to multiple collection agencies...? Which raises the question of whether or not these are legitimate debts. I mean, I know that they are details of when billing was issued checks out with medical needs at the time, but since Im apparently required to pay the same amount to 2 separate agencies per bill so a total of 6 separate collectors, I cant help but wonder if thats normal protocol or whatever... Could this be one those instances where I need to check and see if these are real debts?Moreover, I cant seem to find a way to contact said-agencies - at least not on my own with the help of the internet. So interest is just building... SO! I was considering going to a bank and taking out a loan to pay off all of these separate debts but Im not even sure that I would get a loan given my poor credit. Additionally, Im not sure if this would be a wise, long-term decision.And this isnt even counting my student debt. But thats something I would take up with rstudentloans.TL;DR- have outstanding medical debt with questionable legitimacy; cant find a way to contact individual collectors; credit-score is miserable; better to get a loan and pay off all debts then pay off bank loan, or continue to find a way to contact collectors and pay off debts individually?Thank you all for reading and assistance.  <response>: Its highly unlikely youll get a loan with a 540 credit score.Read up on our section on collectionsHow old are the debts? When did they originally go delinquent? The two things I want to bring to your attention is that 1 they will fall off your report after 7.5 years from the original missed payment, and 2 if they havent sued you for it, they likely wont.Youre not in a financial position to fix this, so dont put yourself further in the hole to not improve the situation. Unless your collections companies decide to be really nice to you, paying the debt wont pull it off your record; it will just change status from Open to Paid. It will still be a past-due report.You can dispute the accounts, generally with few negative side effects. Theres a non-zero chance they wont be able to satisfy the burden of proof, since medical debt has significant complications from HIPAA.As for paying the amount to multiple people: thats not how it works. The first agency sold the debt to the second agency, so only the most recent can collect on it.I dont frequently suggest blindly disputing debt, but I think now would be a good time to get friendly with Credit Karmas Dispute button. If the company doesnt own the debt any more, they probably wont be able to defend the dispute. 