For the past couple of months, I’ve been getting these odd calls from an automated phone dialer. The message is “We are trying to reach a party at this phone number in regards to a business matter. Please call (some long distance phone number, not toll-free either) in Fort Worth Texas.”
This sounds so much like a scam… why on earth are they giving me exactly NO details about this? But for months I’ve been getting the same exact automated message, usually about once a week and sometimes several times a day. Does anyone in the Teeming Millions know what this is all about? Is this actually some legitimate concern, or is this something my state’s attorney general ought to know about instead?
This is a well-known trick of collection agencies. When you return the call, they’ll get the phone number and name from the “Caller ID” portion and know they’ve got a hit. After cross-referencing that, you’ll get live calls.
This is just one scenario how what could be happening…
I had this happen for a few weeks, but it was an 800 number. So I called it from a payphone, and was connected to Ford Motor Credit’s collections department, which is about what I had expected.
Someone had given my phone number out as theirs, and then apparently skipped out on a lot of debt. I had lots of different collection agencies calling me at all hours.
I explained what had happened to the Ford people, and they took me off the list and apologized. Most of the others were about the same. Then there was this one guy who was convinced that I was the guy they were all looking for, and lying about it. He did eventually go away, however.