What should you do when faced with a bad payer?

What should you do when faced with a bad payer?

"Can I sue someone who owes me CHF 2,000 if I have no written document signed by that person, only text messages confirming that they owe me money? She then retracted her statement, insulting me and threatening me.

Under the Federal Law on Debt Collection and Bankruptcy (LP), any person who believes that he or she is the creditor of a defaulting debtor may submit a "debt collection requisition" to the Debt Collection Office in writing or verbally. The debt collection office will then serve a summons to pay on the debtor.

If the debtor you are pursuing does not believe that he owes the sum of money, he can lodge an objection to this act, either verbally or in writing, by making an immediate declaration to the person issuing the summons to pay or to the debt-collection office within ten days of being notified of the summons to pay. If he fails to do so, he runs the risk of having his assets, in particular his salary, seized by the Debt Collection Office or of being made bankrupt if he is entered in the Commercial Register.

In the event of a stop payment, you will have to take the necessary steps to have the stop payment discharged. In this case, as you do not have a written acknowledgement of debt or an enforceable judgment, you can in principle only apply for the debt to be discharged by means of so-called "ordinary" legal proceedings (as opposed to "summary" legal proceedings available to the creditor with the benefit of an acknowledgement of debt or a judgment). You will therefore have to file a claim for payment, i.e. an "action en reconnaissance de dette" under article 79 LP, to have your debtor ordered to pay you the amount he owes you.

As part of this procedure, you will be required to prove the facts on which you base your legal claims. The "text messages" that this person wrote to you will constitute evidence that you will be able to invoke in court, at least if you manage to print them out on paper. The judge will decide after having freely assessed the scope of your explanations. If he is convinced, he will order your debtor to repay you the sum you are claiming from him, and will withdraw his objection to the proceedings, allowing the debtor to continue on his way.