etailers are increasingly aggressive in sending out “civil relief”, “civil recovery” or “civil demand” letters to anyone they accuse of or catch shoplifting in their stores. The bigger chains send out these threatening letters all the time, either from their own loss prevention departments or via outside law firms to whom they outsource these collection efforts.

These letters are aggressive, scary, and threatening.  Often if you ignore the first letter, they will send you increasingly insistent letters, and quite likely increase the amount of the civil relief they want you to pay.

I tell my clients not to pay them, and I’ll go through the reasons why in a moment.  You can ignore these letters, or if you hire us to represent you on a criminal charge, we can write them a letter on your behalf telling them to stop bothering you. [Read more…]