I got a call recently from a guy looking for my brother in law. We have never lived within 500 miles of each other. There is no reason for him to have given out my phone number as his, and he is not the kind of person, or in a situation, who would have. My area code is local, it’s a landline, and he has never lived in this state.
Any thoughts on how my phone number got associated with him in any way?
Credit bureaus try to make any association they can, matching dissimilar databases. Many times the associations are not valid, but there’s no law that forces them to validate. Their idea is that any association at all is better than none. So there are a lot of false associations, and some may go back 40 years.
Unless you can think of a possible association, try googling for both names and see what comes up. If you really care, for a few dollars, you can search for his name (or yours) and get a report which may show the association, although how it got there will be a trade secret.
Might he have ever used you as a credit reference? He doesn’t need to ask before using your name and phone number. And then you become associated with his credit. Not necessarily on his credit report but if he defaults on a loan where he used you as a reference…there you are.
This is true, and I don’t think it’s just credit bureaus. If you google someone’s name and poke around those teaser pages trying to get you pay for “the complete file,” you’ll eventually come across a list of names that could be in any way associated with it. Think of the Kevin Bacon thing. Assuming it’s not a name like John Smith, you could conceivably track someone down by way of his brother-in-law.
Yes. I am currently reading a book, Data & Goliath, which describes a myriad ways that databases can be combined, compared, cross-referenced and are being done all the time. The possibilities are increasing with more and more electronic devices, many of which are tracking your every move.
Although I doubt this is what happened in the OP’s case, if you and your BIL ate lunch together once, the data from your celphones alone (GPS or tower location data) would be sufficient to establish a connection, at least to the CIA or FBI. That’s indeed how they make them sometimes.
Sound paranoid? Maybe, but if everyone’s out to get you, being paranoid is just good thinking. 
At work we use LexisNexis to find leads on stories.
It would give us your number in .3 seconds.
I don’t see why he would. If he needed a reference, my parents are ten times more convenient.
He might have put you down as an emergency contact at a doctor’s office. That’s really code for “how do we get in touch if patient forgets to pay his bill.”
Just a thought.
My sister in law got some snail mail intended for me about my high school reunion. I have no idea how they sleuthed that out.
Maybe he was asked for the number of a relative other than a parent and gave your (or your spouse’s) number. I recall years ago some companies would ask for a string of numbers, the idea being that if you could come up with them they didn’t bother ringing. If you struggled to think of relatives, friends or workmates with phones they didn’t want your business.