This is the second time I’ve gotten a phone call like this, and I’m not sure if it’s a scam.
It was a taped message from someone claiming to be from a debt collector, asking me to call a certain number. They don’t use my name or anything, or try to verify who I am.
Now, my finances aren’t great, but I don’t owe anything that would be sent to a debt collector. And anyway, wouldn’t a reputable debt collecting agency have a live person phone? “This is an attempt to collect a debt. Please return this phone call at this number…” What the hell? You’ve got me on the phone now! What’s wrong with you?
I’m not calling any number that some robo-voice tells me to call, because I’ve heard all sorts of horror stories about phone scams. But I can’t understand this approach. Has anyone else gotten a phone call like this?
Unless a caller can acknowledge you by name, it’s a scam. Unless an unexpected caller using your name can answer basic questions about who they are calling on behalf of and verify that basis by giving you specific company information (payment mailing address, other semi-obscure information you would have at hand), it’s probably a scam.
There are debt collecters, not necessarily reputable, that just pull names out of the phone book that are similar to the ones whose debts they are trying to collect.
I had one that called three times a week for a while. They were looking for someone with my last name (maiden name) and first initial. Middle initial was different, SS# was different, I’d never lived in any of the same areas.
They robo called the first few times and when I didn’t call back, they had real people call. I had to threaten them with a lawyer before they stopped.
If you call them back, they will claim that you must have known that you owe the money, otherwise you would have ignored the call in the first place, and that they don’t have to put you on their “do not call” list, because you called them.
I got a couple of these calls so I did call them back - they asked if I knew so-and-so and I told them I did not. They apologized and explained that they would update their records to indicate that I was not the droid they were looking for (they didn’t use those words…). No more calls.
You take that long? If it’s not a live person on the phone, there’s a pause of a second or two before a recording kicks in, or before an robo-caller transfers it to a live operator. By then, I am already off the line. But usually I just know from caller ID whether or not to answer. If I don’t recognize the company name or number, I let it go to voice mail.
My husband has a fairly common last name. His brother is in the habit of just deciding not to pay bills on occasion. When this happens, we frequently get calls from debt collectors looking for his brother, because the collectors are calling everyone in the phone book with that last name.
I’ve also had people write and call because they’re trying to find relatives with the same last name.
My most recent gripe is that some company has taken to calling us up with options to press 1 if the answerer is Person X, to press 2 if Person X can come to the phone, or to press 3 if Person X can’t come to the phone. There is no option to press 4 to say that there is no Person X at this number!
It could also be that your phone number is somehow attached to whomever they’re looking for and so they’re just calling it in an attempt to get a hold of them. We’re dealing with something like that - my idiot brother-in-law has a number of unpaid debts, and his wife (my SIL) is currently living with us, so we get calls for him because he’s connected to her and she’s connected to our phone number. However, in this case, they always identify that they’re looking for him in the message. (Like, “John Doe, it’s urgent that you contact me about case #xxxxxx immediately for important information.”) They always specify a name, and it’s always his and not Mr. Snicks or mine.
The last time this happened, Mr. Snicks was annoyed enough (after about a month of calls) to pick up the phone. He identified himself and his relationship to BIL, and then said that BIL doesn’t live here. They asked him if he knew how to get in contact with BIL (difficult, for a variety of reasons) and then apologized and said they’d update their records to take our number off the list. So, in our case, it worked out to have a word with them, but I totally understand your reluctance.
Just dealt with one of these myself. Kept getting robocalls and the occasional person leaving messages on my work number, for a woman whom I’ve never heard of. I’ve been at that number for going on two years now.
Called the 800 number that showed up on my caller ID and got some company; the worker did not announce which company. Told her that somebody from her organization kept calling my work number looking for a woman that I had not heard of. Gave the worker the woman’s name and my work number; she said they would no longer associate that number with the deadbeat.
I know I’m piling on here…but now that we have this new-fangled internet thingie, why on God’s green earth would you not simply google the phone number right off the bat before posting what is basically (without the number we can all google for you) an unanswerable question?
If it’s a scammer, generally the phone number is spoofed. If it’s a legit credit collector, then it’s quite likely that the recipient of the phone call doesn’t recognize the name of the company, even if s/he knows that s/he owes money to someone, as the debt gets sold.
And then there are semi-legit credit collectors, that is, they occasionally collect on real debts, but they also buy up lists of old noncollectable debts, or even lists of debts that were paid off long ago. Camco attempted to collect on a debt that my husband and I had paid off something like 10 years ago. I Googled the company, and sent them a nastygram, with a copy to the FTC(?) (some gummint agency), saying that we disputed the debt, that we’d already paid it off, and that they needed to contact us only by snail mail, not by phone, and also that even if we really owed the money, it was past the legal deadline to collect on it. I sent it registered, return receipt requested, to the company HQ. Never heard from them again.
I think that it’s perfectly valid to ask if a robocall might be a legitimate method of attempting to collect on a debt, or if it’s a common scam method.
I did an internship at a debt collection agency (in IT, not collecting, thank God!). I believe they had an auto-dialer, but it patched through to a real person as soon as the phone was picked up. They also would immediately stop calling anyone who said they had the wrong person.
Even the legit collection agencies are hell-holes. They don’t treat the collectors much better than they treat the debtors. The average employment length was three months - including one month of training!
From what I’ve seen, every debt collector is different. I worked at 2 different 3rd party debt collectors for over 3 years and yours wasn’t my experience at all. I was only a skip tracer but did see a small amount of collectors come in convinced they were going to make thousands a day w/ some ‘new method’ they figured out. This was usually some variant of stealing or otherwise violating the FDCPA and they’d be trotted past everyone in the cube farm, escorted on each arm by a supervisor or officer. THOSE people usually showed their idiocy and greed in the first few months. The larger one was publicly traded and held us all close to the Sorbanes-Oxley regs; maybe they’re also more employee-friendly?
Huh. Well, I certainly hope for their sake that most collections workplaces were better than the one I saw! No-one worked there to get rich that I’m aware of. It was an economically depressed area, and they were the biggest employer that would take people with no college education or work history. People usually worked there because they were out of other options. I’m not sure about SOX regulations, but there was certainly lots of attention paid to the legal limits of what they could do, at least concerning collecting. Sexual harassment, though… eh, if the guy is fluent in Spanish and can bring in more money on his own than most entire teams, who cares if he makes sexually explicit comments about everything in sight, amiright? :dubious:
Skip tracing sounds kind of interesting, actually.
