This isn’t happening to me, but a co-worker. HONEST.
Co-worker gets a call from a loan company, saying that she was listed as a reference on some person’s car loan application. Fine and dandy, except she doesn’t KNOW the person applying for the loan. But the first name sounds kind of familiar (it’s foreign and distinctive). So she gets the applicant’s full name from the loan company, calls a friend whom she thinks knows the applicant, and is able to confirm the last name.
Turns out that the loan applicant is the friend of an ex-friend whom she had met briefly at a party, first-names only. Ex-friend (apparently an evil whore, hence the “ex” bit) was trying to get the car loan through the friend/applicant, and probably urged her to list the co-worker as a reference (how else would applicant have known co-worker’s contact information, since she knew only co-worker’s first name?).
So co-worker is able to call the loan company back and say, “Yeah, I’ve only ever been in applicant’s presence for 2.5 seconds, and I would NOT recommend extending a loan given her behavior here.”
Done with? Not quite.
Co-worker gets another call from a different loan company today, same applicant/scenario. She again had to say that she didn’t know the applicant. It made her distraught, and took time and attention away from the project she was in the middle of at the time of the call.
Here’s my question(s): Could ex-friend be doing this purposefully to get back at co-worker? Does this constitute harassment? Is there anything co-worker can do to prevent applicant from listing her name as a reference again, short of calling her and bitching her out?
Any creative Doper solutions for this kind of thing? (within the law, of course!)
IANA Lawyer or anything like that, but it seems to me that it really doesn’t constitute harassement. I also don’t think there’s any real recourse except to continue giving negative references. You’d think that after being turned down a few times, this dumb bunny would get a clue and use different references. Probably everyone she knows has already given bad references so she’s reduced to giving strangers’ names.
If it’s only happened twice, I wouldn’t worry about it.
If there start to be more calls than that, I’d be very careful about what I say. I would say only something short and factual, like “I only met this person briefly at a party, and do not know her well enough to give either a positive or negative reference.” This could be more than harrassment, it could be a set-up to get your friend to say negative things that are defamatory.
If there’s just the two calls, forget it. If there’s more, then I’d contact legal advice.
How about your friend contacts the person listing her as a reference and says “I’m sorry but I cannot provide a credit reference for you. Please don’t list me as such.”
On the offchance that the person is reasonable.
Frankly this’d be a weird way of harrassing somebody…putting your credit rating on the line?
I think you should be very concerned about a possible scam.
The other two may be in on it together. Trying to get a loan with your name co-signed on it. Identity theft type thing. After they get the car, they don’t make payments and run. The blotch appears on your record.
Get your current credit report from all 3 agencies including a list of who’s been asking for it. If car dealers have been asking for it, then contact each one of them and let them know you are not really a participant. Make sure you put everything in writing.
Find out the agency in your state that investigates identity fraud and get some help from them on how to handle this.
Just to clarify: the ex-friend and her friend were not trying to name co-worker as a co-signer, just listing her as a character reference in order to obtain the loan.
Obviously, ex-friend shouldn’t expect co-worker to shower her with praises when speaking to the loan companies, due to the huge and nasty falling-out they had.
And that is why I wonder if ex-friend is trying to “harass” co-worker, by getting all these loan companies to call her at work and fluster her with memories of their falling out (stirring up old s#*t). Kinda like when you obtain an enemy’s e-mail address and sign them up for every single spam list you can find? (I’ve never actually done this, but first heard of it from another Doper…)
Anyhoo, because a loan application is a legal document, I was wondering if there might be some kind of abuse of the system going on here, or if there was a a way to prevent co-worker from being listed as a reference. Again, short of calling friend and bitching her out (politely, of course!).
???
This is a reference on a loan app. Could someone really have grounds to sue even if you said the most extreme thing you could think of? “John Doe? Oh yes, I know him. He blows dead goats.” If John Doe put you down as a reference have you broken any law?
(Pardon my French. No goats were harmed in the production of this post)
how do you even know that it is really a loan agency that called you? it could be that friend of an ex-friend yanking you your chain. (or some other friend). but be consoled by the fact that if they want to put you down for a reference again, they probably have to fill out some long forms, a lot of work just to have your phone ring during dinner.
Co-worker received a call last week from a credit card company. Someone was trying to get a credit card in her name, and the lender was alerted to contact her first, since someone had successfully taken out a cell phone account in her name last year (she was not held responsible for the charges).
WELL
She called DMV and made an inquiry about someone having a copy of her driver’s license, which got the investigation rolling. Turns out that the woman who was trying to get the car loan had resorted to applying for various accounts posing as my co-worker! Identity theft! FRAUD! They’ve nabbed her on drug charges and she’s now sitting in a county jail.
The kicker: when the woman was first pulled over and caught, she presented co-worker’s ID as her own. Of course the cop noticed the face of the woman didn’t match the picture on the ID. The woman’s been in this country for 30 years, how stupid do you have to become? :smack:
Oh yeah, and now they know for sure that she was the one who took out the account on the cell phone last year.
ftg, you called it first. Kudos. Co-worker had already closed all her accounts and put an alert out to the big 3 from the cell phone incident last year, but now she’s considering changing her social.
