<prompt> Human: My wife, over a year ago, thought she submitted three paystubs to qualify for deferment for a year. We currently work overseas, and never received an email or phone call about her loans that she hadnt ever actually done that. Incredibly stupid of us not to double check that everything was OK, but here we are. The first message we received sent to her mother, which we have listed as our physical address in the US was that her loans had been sent to a collections agency. Her loans are about 22k. Is there anything that we can do to properly get her loans deferred, or is it too late at this point and we just have to deal with a collections agency?  <response>: Use the magic words when they call Ill need you to go ahead and verify the debt. This should put a temporary stay on their collection attempts. If they persist before the debt has been verified you may have a claim for illegal debt collection.The purpose of this is to buy yourself some nuisance-free time to fix the issue. I dont practice in this area so I cant vouch for what to do next, however I do know the magic words should automatically prevent further collection attempts on a short-term basis. 