Americans with overdue debts run a gauntlet.  First come the letters.  Then the phone calls.  And consumers end up in court, sued by collectors who hope that a favorable judgment will allow them to garnish wages or seize assets.

Fed up with what they call harassment, an increasing number of debtors are now taking the initiative and suing creditors first.  Arming themselves with the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, or FDCPA, they go after collection agencies for a wide range of violations, such as automated phone calls, which are illegal, that give creditors a bad reputation.

“The decline of the economy is causing bill collectors to become more and more aggressive, and people are getting more desperate,” says Steve Katz, a former debt collector who runs a chat board called Debtorboard for aggrieved consumers.  He points out that consumers who have lost their livelihoods often have little choice but to fight off debts in court.

There were 8,347 consumer lawsuits filed against collection agencies in 2009, a 55% increase over 2008 and double the number filed in 2007, according to the FDCPA Case Listing Service, an organization that tracks lawsuits.

Some consumers are first-time plaintiffs, who suddenly find themselves unable to pay debts and feel wronged by aggressive collectors.  Others, usually with debts worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, sue repeatedly in the hope that favorable judgments will get collectors off their backs.  Debt collectors sometimes refer to these consumers as “credit terrorists.”

Laura Cinquino from New Jersey, who was laid off from two jobs as a medical assistant last year, is a debtor who found herself in a vicious struggle with a collection agency following what seemed like a simple misunderstanding.  Cinquino, who was also attending college to become a registered nurse, hadn’t paid a $600 credit card bill with Washington Mutual when the bank collapsed.  When WaMu was taken over by JPMorgan Chase, Cinquino said, her bills started to arrive in Chase envelopes.  Cinquino, who said she usually pays her bills online, disregarded the letters thinking they were related to her auto loan.  So when she received a voice mail from a bill collection agency one day, she did a double-take.

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