Be ready to call on the state. Or have your sib do it if the harassment continues.
I had a few months of calls on my cell for a guy I had never heard of. He must have put my phone number on his home insurance form. idky Then his house was destroyed by a hurricane and he stopped paying his mortgage. I got a call from his insurance co, told them they had the wrong number. I felt sorry for the poor guy who wasn’t getting his insurance $. Quiet for a few years. Then the harassing calls started from the creditor. Of course they didn’t believe I wasn’t him and never heard of him. I finally ended up calling the state AG office and also filing with a few federal agencies to make it stop.
Two useful questions to remember, should they call again: “do you know the legal definition of 'harrassment?” If you’ve asked them not to call again, and they do, they have met that definition-- actually, they met it when they called the first time since it’s not your debt. The second is “what is your operator number?” Employees of boiler room companies such as this use fake names, but they can be traced by their operator number, which legally they must give if requested.
Generally if you show that you know they’re doing something illegal, they knock it off.
I got a call at work from a guy trying to track down a former employee who left a year ago. I figured out it was a college loan debt collector.
My sister has a friend who always has bill collectors chasing her. The friend keeps changing her phone number to get away from them. My sister entered her friend in a contest and didn’t know the friend’s new phone number, so my sister wrote down her own phone number. Next day, my sister started getting phone calls from the friend’s bill collector.
Calling once, even in error, is not harassment. Even calling again a few times isn’t as long as they’ve made steps to correct their records. You can request to be put on the ‘do not call’ list, but that can take a few days. It is not illegal for collectors to call you looking for information, which is what happened here. You have no obligation to provide it and they can’t harass you.
Do keep a log if the calls continue, do caller ID, get the operator number. If it really becomes a problem, then contact the consumer complaint division of your state attorney general. In this case, it appears there is confusion in the files. It is not the OP’s job, or even her sister’s job, to straighten this out, but sometimes life is a LOT easier if you just explain it to the caller and ask them to include the info in the file. My brother does owe a lot of bills. There is some poor guy in the city my brother lives in who has the exact same name, both born in August (I think about 2 years apart). This guy got stopped for speeding and it took a lot of talking to convince the cop he wasn’t my brother with all the parking tickets and he shouldn’t be arrested on the spot. (I called this guy once after trying to reach my brother and getting the number from Information, so he told me the whole story. I felt for him!)
If you are nice to the collectors, they can be nice too. Also note that there are different rules for those collecting their own debts (say a Macy’s employee calling you direct) than someone collecting for another - a true collection company. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (federal) does not apply to the first, but does to the second. Other laws, including state laws, may apply to both.
Call the college. Even if it’s been years, they may be able to verify a loan they made or authorized. Even if they sold it.
I got one of the out of the blue calls. The college verified it was an old $200 NDSL, long forgotten. I was reassured. I also griped because the collector was extremely aggressive but provided no details. Just the dollar amount.
@twoinanddone: you’re right. I misread and was under the impression the company had revealed the debt to the OP. Discussing someone’s debt with a third party is illegal, one occasion of calling them for contact information without doing so is annoying.
From checking my Caller ID, I noticed the company had called several times last week but didn’t leave a message until last Tuesday. An Internet search of the call back number revealed it was a legitimate debt collector. They called again the next day and this time I answered and told them this didn’t concern me and to stop calling. The calls have now stopped.
Sib is 100% sure there is a mix up. Parents paid for BA obtained years ago. Sib didn’t seek masters until years later and that’ being paid by employer. It was while trying to figure out why these people were calling that sib remembered the college name confusion from years ago. Back then, everything was done by paper and sib recalled them being very lackadaisical about such things. Nobody thought of identity theft in those days. Sib does admit they should have taken it as a warning when the transcripts arrived co-mingled instead of blowing it off as “typical” But sib knows what to do now so “the matter” is in sib’s hands, not mine. The calls have stopped for me…
It is true that debt collectors can call third parties to ask for a person’s whereabouts. They’re also required to stop calling when the third party tells to them too. I did find various complaints about the company from relatives, friends, neighbors and those who just happened to now have the phone number of the person being sought. And yes, complaints from people who had the same name and there was a mix up too. But the majority of complaints came from when they found the right person. Lots of ugly stories there.
Thanks for the advice everyone! This issue is now closed for me, although it can be a warning to those who do take out student loans. Pay them off in a timely matter and avoid defaulting. If people who have nothing to do with the loan are called either by mistake or location search, think of how it can be if it’s really you they’re looking for.
I used to get phone calls from debt collectors who thought they were calling DH’s EX-stepmother. We share the same name. Those calls didn’t really bother me-I’d tell them they had the wrong Jane Doe and that all I knew was that she had moved to a specific city in Florida, and they would usually quit calling me.
^^^And kind of fun. I experienced her lovely personality when one of DH’s family members died, and I have to say she showed herself to be quite a horrible human being. So nah, I didn’t feel any need to help her give the collectors the slip.
We used to get A LOT of phone calls from the Church of Scientology for H–or rather someone with H’s name. They claimed he was a member and/or they owed him money. We kept asking them to stop calling and asked to speak to a supervisor and asked for their address to serve them with a complaint for harrassment. We finally got caller ID and stopped answering the phone. We could never convince them they had the wrong phone number. Sometimes the calls were from out of country and mostly from out of state. They would call regularly for a while then stop & then start up again. Knock wood, I think they’ve finally given up since we got caller ID.
We were getting some weird phone calls from Dominican Republic. We called and asked our phone company (land line) to block them, so that was helpful and has finally stopped as well.
So far, haven’t gotten debt collector calls–yuck!
I did have the same first & last name as 2 other girls. We all graduated the same year from HS. One of them went to flagship U with me & picked up my reg packet by accident. The next year, we both went to UOregon as exchange students & lived in the same dorm! She kept getting all my mail, so we finally gave each other the combo for the mail box, so we could take misdelivered mail (which happened often).
Yes and it’s not new. At least 10 years ago I had a collection agency call our home looking for my FIL (lives in another state). Collections people get a percentage of funds they recover - that’s why they are so creative and persistent.
