Company Facts

Caine & Weiner was founded in 1930 and incorporated in 1959. Its headquarters sits at 5805 Sepulveda Boulevard, 4th Floor, Sherman Oaks, California 91411. Older directory listings and account correspondence often show a Woodland Hills address on Erwin Street, which was a prior location, so both circulate online.

Additional offices operate in Schaumburg, Illinois, and in Dallas and Denison, Texas. The main line is 1-818-902-4255, with a general number at 866-499-2575. Payments and account access run through connectcw.com, clients use a separate portal, and written correspondence goes to the lockbox at P.O. Box 55848, Sherman Oaks, California 91413-0848.

Licensing published on the company site includes NMLS ID 953717, California license 10465-99, Nevada license CA10136, and New York City license 1157930. The company has been a BBB accredited business since 2006, and it lists agents available to communicate in Spanish.

On the client side, Caine & Weiner says it serves roughly 20 percent of Fortune 500 companies across more than 30 sectors, naming advertising, automotive, banking, healthcare, fintech, insurance, manufacturing, retail, and telecommunications among them.

What They Actually Do

The company runs four related lines, and knowing which one is contacting you clarifies a great deal.

Commercial collections is the historic core. This is business to business recovery, meaning unpaid invoices between companies rather than consumer accounts. It is a genuinely different discipline: the debtor is an entity with a registered agent and public filings, the underlying document is a contract or purchase order, and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act does not apply because the FDCPA covers debts incurred for personal, family, or household purposes.

Consumer collections runs as a separate unit handling third party consumer debt, where the FDCPA and Regulation F do apply in full.

First party outsourcing, which the company markets as a surrogate voice program, means working accounts in the client's name before charge off. A consumer contacted at this stage may believe they are speaking with the original company, because functionally they are speaking with its outsourced agent.

Global receivables solutions covers international placements, where a creditor is chasing a debtor outside the United States and needs someone who can navigate another country's collection framework.

Caine & Weiner is an agency, not a debt buyer. It works accounts on behalf of creditors and does not purchase portfolios, which means settlement authority comes from the client rather than sitting with the collector. Our explainer on what a third party collection agency is covers why that distinction changes the negotiation.

The Commercial Side Is Different in Ways That Matter

If you are a business that received a Caine & Weiner letter about an unpaid invoice, most consumer debt advice does not apply to you.

The FDCPA protections that limit call times, restrict third party contact, and require validation notices exist for consumer debts. A commercial claim between two businesses generally falls outside that framework, though state law, contract terms, and general prohibitions on fraud and unfair practices still apply.

Commercial collectors also have investigative tools that consumer collectors do not, because business information is public. Secretary of state filings, UCC filings, registered agent records, and litigation history are all searchable, which makes a business debtor considerably easier to locate and evaluate than a former tenant who moved.

The practical response to a commercial claim is to pull the underlying contract and invoice history immediately, determine whether the goods or services were actually delivered as specified, check for offsets and disputes documented at the time, and respond in writing rather than ignoring it. Commercial claims escalate to litigation more readily than consumer ones, because the amounts are larger and the debtor usually has assets.

What to Do If They Contact You About a Consumer Debt

The standard sequence applies, and it starts with verification rather than payment.

The first communication must include validation information covering the amount claimed, the creditor the debt is owed to, an itemization of the balance, and notice of the right to dispute. Disputing in writing within 30 days suspends collection until verification is mailed. Send it to the Sherman Oaks lockbox address by a method that creates proof of delivery, and be specific about what is wrong rather than generically denying the balance, an approach covered in our guide to disputing a debt collection claim.

Determine which stage you are in. If the contact is first party, meaning it arrives in the original company's name, you may have more flexibility by dealing with the creditor's own customer service, and the account may not yet be reported to the credit bureaus. If it is third party, the account has typically been charged off and the tradeline is either reported or coming. Our post on whether to pay a debt collector or the original creditor covers how to tell and which route is better.

Keep phone contact brief and get everything in writing. Because Caine & Weiner works accounts on behalf of clients rather than owning them, the collector's authority to settle is set by the creditor, so pushing hard on the phone often produces less than a written request routed through the client. Our guide to what to say to debt collectors covers the short script.

Two timing rules apply. Check your state's statute of limitations before paying anything on an older account, since a payment or written acknowledgment restarts the clock in many states. And remember that a collection tradeline stays on a credit report for seven years from the original delinquency on the underlying account, regardless of when it was placed or paid.

The CFPB's debt collection resource center explains federal rights and accepts complaints, and its public complaint database lets you review any agency's record, including this one, for patterns rather than raw counts. California consumers have additional protections under the Rosenthal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and New York City consumers can find translated debt collection materials through the city's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection.

How It Compares

Caine & Weiner's distinguishing characteristic is breadth. Ninety plus years of operation, commercial and consumer units under one roof, first party and third party service lines, and international capability is a wide footprint, and it fits large corporate clients who want one vendor across many receivable types.

That breadth has a cost, and it is the same tradeoff that appears throughout this industry. An agency serving thirty sectors is not deeply specialized in any one of them, and specialization matters most where the account depends on documents rather than on a balance figure.

Rental collections are the clearest example. A move out balance turns on a specific lease, an itemized ledger, a security deposit disposition, and dated inspection photographs, and resolving a dispute usually means someone pulling the file and answering a question about one line item. That work does not scale like a uniform commercial invoice. Advanced Collection Bureau works residential, apartment, student housing, and medical placements on contingency out of Rockledge, Florida, reports to the credit bureaus twice monthly, and serves clients nationwide. The team can be reached at 321-633-4999 or through the get started page.