9 Signs Your “Restructuring Company” Is Actually a Lead Broker

Why So Many “Restructuring” Calls Are Really Sales Calls

Follow the money for a second. A funded advance pays somebody a commission the day it wires, and a balance negotiated down to 40 cents pays nobody a commission at all. So the cheapest way to monetize an owner who searches “stop MCA debits” at 11pm is to answer the phone, collect the revenue numbers, and route the file to whoever pays most for a live one. The federal rule that would normally stop this, the advance fee ban at 16 C.F.R. §310.4(a)(5), is written around consumer debt and does not reach a call between a telemarketer and a business at all, because §310.6(b)(7) exempts business-to-business calls from most of the Telemarketing Sales Rule.

Two pieces of the rule do survive that exemption, and they matter to you: 16 C.F.R. §310.3(a)(2), which makes it a violation to misrepresent any material aspect of a debt relief service including the percentage a customer may save and how long results take, and §310.3(a)(4), which covers any false or misleading statement made to get you to pay. They can charge you upfront, but they cannot lie about what they are selling. Every sign below distinguishes a firm that will read your agreements from an outfit whose product is your phone number. One sign can have an innocent explanation. Three is a pattern.

1. The First Question Is Your Revenue, Not Your Debt

Listen to the order of the questions. Underwriting a new advance requires four data points: monthly gross deposits, time in business, average daily balance, and how many positions are already debiting. Diagnosing a restructuring requires a different set entirely: the signed agreements and amendments, the specified purchased amount against what has been remitted, the ACH ledger, a UCC search in your state of organization, and any summons or judgment on file. If the first four questions were your revenue, your time in business, your credit score, and how much you are looking for, you were underwritten, not diagnosed.

From their side of the table this is rational. A broker earns on origination, which means the file only becomes revenue if a deal funds, and a deal only funds if you look fundable. So the intake is designed to establish fundability, not distress. That is also why the person on the phone gets uncomfortable when you say the words “I do not want more money, I want to pay less.” You have just moved the file out of the only category that pays them.

The counter move takes fifteen seconds. Ask them to tell you, before anything else, what your total remaining obligation is across all positions and which of those agreements contains a reconciliation clause. A firm that works these files answers with a request for documents. A broker answers with a question about your deposits, because the answer you want is not in the script.

2. A Settlement Percentage Quoted Before Anyone Reads Your Agreement

Business debt settlements land in ranges, and the range moves for reasons that live inside the paperwork: whether the agreement contains a reconciliation clause and whether the funder honored it, whether a confession of judgment was signed and in which county, how far into default you are, whether the demanded balance includes accelerated purchased amount plus stacked default fees, and whether the funder made the disclosures its state requires. Across the files the attorneys we work with have settled, advances commonly resolve at 30% to 60% of the outstanding balance, and where your file sits in that band is knowable only after somebody reads the contract.

So when a caller says “we settle everything around 20 points” before a single document has crossed his desk, he is not making a prediction, he is closing you. Funders price files individually, and the ones who price aggressively do it because they saw a defense coming, not because a percentage was announced on a sales call. You can see more on how the band actually works on our MCA settlements page.

There is a second problem with the quoted number, which is that it becomes the reason you decline the next three calls. A business owner who has been told 20% will not accept 45%, even when 45% is the number a court file supports, and the advance keeps debiting for another four months while he shops for the fiction. The quote costs you time you do not have.

3. Nobody on the Call Is an Attorney and Nobody Will Name One

Ask this exact question: if my funder sues me in Kings County next month, who appears, and are they admitted in New York? A firm that works these files answers with a name, a state, and how counsel gets engaged. A broker answers with “our legal department” or “we have attorneys we work with,” which is not an answer, because the parts of a restructuring that carry real risk are legal acts. Answering a summons is a legal act. Moving to vacate a judgment entered on a confession is a legal act. Raising usury or arguing that a purchase of receivables was a loan in substance is a legal act.

In New York, Judiciary Law §478 makes it unlawful for a person who has not been admitted and registered to practice as an attorney or to hold himself out as entitled to, and §484 makes it unlawful to ask for or receive compensation, directly or indirectly, for appearing for another person as attorney in any court. Every state has an equivalent. That is why the honest version of this business is structured the way it is: a settlement company handles negotiation and process, and licensed attorneys handle the parts that are practice of law.

Delancey Street is not a law firm, and it says so. It is a business debt and MCA settlement company that works with a nationwide network of licensed attorneys, and those attorneys are the ones who negotiate with your funder, raise defenses, and sign the settlement agreement. The distinction is not a technicality. It tells you who is accountable for the courtroom part of your file, and a company that cannot answer that question has no plan for the courtroom part of your file.

4. The “Restructuring” Is Another Advance With Daily Debits

Read the document they email you, not the label on it. If it says purchase of future receivables, if it has a specified purchased amount and a purchase price, if there is an ACH authorization page, if a personal guaranty of performance is attached, and if a UCC-1 is going to be filed against your entity, what you have been sold is financing. The common version is a reverse consolidation, where a new funder wires you a weekly amount covering your existing daily debits while taking a larger debit of its own. Your positions do not go away. You now have one more.

The arithmetic is where this shows itself. Three positions pulling a combined $1,150 a day against $310,000 of remaining obligations get replaced by a single agreement with a $364,000 purchased amount at $1,400 a day over roughly 260 business days. The daily pull went up by $250, the term reset, and the total obligation grew by $54,000 before anyone negotiated anything. That is not a restructuring, and calling it one is precisely the kind of statement §310.3(a)(4) reaches.

New York gives you a way to test the offer. Under N.Y. Financial Services Law §801, a person who solicits and presents a specific offer of commercial financing on behalf of a third party is itself a “provider,” which means the outfit brokering your deal owes you the §803 disclosures: total financing amount, finance charge, estimated APR, total repayment amount, term, payment frequency, fees, prepayment terms, and collateral. Section 810 adds that when a provider states a rate during the application process, it must also state the annual percentage rate. A term sheet showing a factor rate and no APR is a compliance problem.

5. The Fee Is Due Before Anything Has Been Settled

In the consumer world this practice is flatly illegal. The Telemarketing Sales Rule bars a debt relief service from requesting or receiving any fee until it has actually renegotiated, settled, reduced, or altered at least one debt under an agreement the customer executed, and until the customer has made a payment under that agreement. Where a dedicated account is used, §310.4(a)(5)(ii) requires that the account sit at an insured institution, that the customer own the funds, that the administrator be unaffiliated with the debt relief company, and that the customer be able to walk away and get the money back within seven business days.

None of that protects you, and the reason is jurisdictional rather than moral. The rule defines a debt relief service by reference to a person and one or more unsecured creditors, and §310.6(b)(7) exempts calls between a telemarketer and a business. State law usually stops at the same line: California’s Fair Debt Settlement Practices Act forbids collecting a fee before a settlement is executed and paid, at Cal. Civ. Code §1788.302(c)(2), but §1788.301 defines covered debt as money owed by a natural person for personal, family, or household purposes. Your trucking company is not a natural person.

So the upfront fee is legal and it is still a tell, and it arrives in two dressed-up versions. The first is “the first month’s payment is our fee,” which means you funded a program before a single funder was contacted. The second is a retainer called a document review fee, collected by ACH on the same call, out of the account the funders are already debiting. A firm that earns on results does not need your money before results, which is why no upfront fees is the standard here rather than a favor.

6. There Is No Written Scope and No Fee Agreement

A two page document answers everything a first call cannot. It names the creditors by entity and account, position by position, so both sides know what is inside the engagement. It states what the company will do and, more usefully, what it will not: whether an answer gets filed if you are sued, whether counsel gets retained and who pays that counsel, whether UCC-3 terminations are a condition of any settlement it signs. It states the fee formula, when the fee is earned, what happens to money you deposit, and that you can terminate.

Brokers do not produce this document because producing it would require deciding what they are actually selling. What arrives instead is an authorization form, a limited power of attorney, and an ACH page, which together let somebody contact your funders and debit your account without ever committing to an outcome or a duty. Notice what is missing in that stack: any obligation running toward you.

The absence also costs you later. If the engagement goes badly and there is no written scope, your complaint has no measuring stick, and a state regulator or a court has nothing to compare the conduct against. Every enforcement file that goes anywhere in this industry goes somewhere because a document said one thing and the conduct did another. Ask for the fee agreement before you ask about the fee, and read our list of what separates the real firms from the rest before you sign.

7. The Entity on the Paperwork Is Not the Brand That Called You

The brand you googled, the brand on the caller ID, and the entity in the signature block are frequently three different things. Sometimes that is ordinary corporate structure. Sometimes the marketing name belongs to a lead generation shell, the servicing entity is a separate LLC formed nine months ago, and the funding entity is a third company in a different state. The practical consequence arrives later: if you want a refund or you want to sue over what you were promised, you are suing whichever entity signed, and that entity may hold nothing but a bank account and a phone system.

Three checks take about twenty minutes. Pull the entity name in your secretary of state’s business search and look at the formation date and the registered agent. Compare the entity on the agreement to the entity on the ACH authorization, because a mismatch means your money and your contract sit with different companies. Then check whether that entity appears on the registry in states that require one.

Registration is now real in several states. Virginia requires sales-based financing providers and brokers to register with the State Corporation Commission under Va. Code §6.2-2230, with a $1,000 initial fee and a $500 annual fee due by September 15, and a registration that expires by operation of law if the fee is missed. Connecticut requires providers and commercial financing brokers to register with the Banking Commissioner under Conn. Gen. Stat. §36a-870. An outfit brokering deals into a registration state without appearing on that registry has a problem separate from yours, and that is reason enough to keep your statements.

8. Stop Paying and Stop Talking, With No Defensive Plan

Stopping payment is sometimes the right move and it is never a first-call move, because it starts a clock rather than pausing one. A missed debit generally triggers the default provisions, which accelerate the full uncollected purchased amount and add default fees. It opens the door to enforcement of the UCC-1 blanket lien, including notification to your account debtors so your customers start paying the funder directly. Where a confession of judgment was signed and is still enforceable, it can produce a judgment without a lawsuit. And a suit that lands with a restraining notice can freeze the operating account you use to make payroll.

A real defensive plan sequences those risks before anything stops. The agreements get read for reconciliation and usury exposure first. ACH authorization gets revoked in writing through your bank, with the revocation documented, rather than by moving money to a new account and hoping. Counsel gets identified in the state where suit is most likely, which is usually the venue named in the agreement. A reserve gets set aside so there is something to settle with when the funder calls back. Some of this is state specific: Virginia now prohibits confessions of judgment in sales-based financing outright under Va. Code §6.2-2234, and other states have narrowed them.

Whether to stop paying is a decision with legal consequences running in both directions, and it belongs with an attorney who has read your specific agreements, not with a stranger on an intake call who has read none of them. If a lawsuit has already been filed against you personally, the calendar starts running immediately, and our page on what happens when the funder sues you personally walks through the first steps.

9. Four Other Companies Call You Within 48 Hours

This is the one that removes all doubt, and the mechanism is simple. The form you filled out or the numbers you read off your bank statement became a lead record: monthly deposits, bank name, existing positions, industry, state, and a cell number that answers. That record has a market price, and it can be sold or shared with a buyer network within minutes. Nothing about the calls that follow requires a data breach or a rogue employee, because in most cases the transfer is exactly what the fine print on the form permitted.

You also have less protection than you assume. The National Do Not Call Registry covers personal phone numbers and does not cover business lines, so calls to your company line are not registry violations at all, and the business-to-business exemption at §310.6(b)(7) removes most of the rest of the Telemarketing Sales Rule. The FCC tried to narrow this practice with a 2023 order requiring one-to-one consent before a lead could be passed to multiple sellers, and the Eleventh Circuit vacated that rule in Insurance Marketing Coalition, Ltd. v. FCC on January 24, 2025, days before it took effect. As of 2026 the loophole is open.

What you can do is treat the callbacks as evidence. Write down the name of the company you contacted first and the date. When the next four calls come, ask each caller where they got your number and to send you the record of consent in writing. Then send the original company a written revocation of consent to share your information, and keep a copy. It will not stop the calls, but it establishes what happened to your file, and it is the single most useful document you will have if a regulator ever asks.

Who Should You Call? Our Top-Rated Business Debt Firms

One firm on this list works the entire lifecycle of a business debt file, from stopping the daily debits through attorney-led negotiation, UCC lien removal, and a signed release. The other two cover broader debt categories that often sit alongside the advances. Choose accordingly.