<prompt> Human: Ive spent the last 48 hours reading through various posts about how to properly deal with debt collectors. Ive come to find out that no matter what, I should send a Debt Validation letter to the collections company who contacted me. The problem Ive encountered is Ive found quite a few different sample letters that all seem to include varying levels of detail and requirements the collections company needs to meet. Can anyone help me? These are a few of the sample letters Ive seen that are all different:Sample 1 - The BalanceSample 2 - random law groupSample 3 - random google lawyerSo, those each have varying degrees of detail requested, so Im not entirely sure which I should utilize. For some background, the debt is for between 1000 and 2000, and Im 95 sure this is a valid debt. So two follow up questions: Is it dumb to send a Debt Validation letter on a debt I know to be valid? If I have the funds to pay off this debt completely I do do I still need to send a Debt Validation letter or should I send something else? Thanks for you help!  <response>: Is it dumb to send a Debt Validation letter on a debt I know to be valid?No. There are a few reasons. One is that collections agencies are shady. It has happened that as debt is bought and sold, someone pays off one agency only to get a call for the same debt from another agency. Or that a person paid the original creditor and the debt was sent to collections erroneously. Companies screw up. Collections agencies screw up. Get the validation. Once you confirm it is legit, and have the amount in front of you go ahead and pay it. From my own background, I had multiple student loans before they were all acquired by the same servicer. It was hard keeping track of all of them. I should have consolidated. I discovered that I accidentally forgot to make payments for six months on one of them.Whoops.Wasnt a lot of money. I think it was a 15 payment on my smallest loan. I forgot, and they came knocking. Validate the debt. Its at that point that I discover that the reason I overlooked this loan was that it was sold to another servicer. I had been sending payments to the prior owner of the debt. So I wasnt 6 months delinquent. I was three months delinquent and those first three months should have been forwarded from the prior owner, but werent. Small amount of cash. My fault for the inattention. But the validation letter helped clarify things. 