Rude collection agents/creditor nightmares

[Nava]

Not that kind of problem, but my name (changed to protect… well, nobody really, but at least to make things a bit harder) let’s say is Marisol Pérez de Liébana Zabalza.

Sometime in '96 or '97, when I was living in Miami, I got a call from a debt collector asking whether I was María García. Nope, I’m not, nor have I ever used that name. Further, I hate it when people insist in calling me María, and while I know about 20 of my lastnames (not in order, I know more on Dad’s side than on Mom’s), none of them is García.

In '03, I was entering the US again when the customs agent burst out laughing. His computer had shown a list of “alias” longer than the two of us standing on top of each other: María Pérez (uh, no, that’s what some Americans insist on calling me), Marisol Pérez (yes, I do sign that name), María Sol Pérez, María del Sol Pérez… etc etc, a lot of combos which the Spanish government doesn’t consider aliases because they’re “evident derivations of the full legal name” - plus María García.

OK. So, because a debt collector started calling every Hispanic woman named Mary-something in Florida (that’s got to be, uh, about 40% of the Hispanic population) thinking we might be their María García… all those women ended up with “María García” as their alias? Whomever lists those needs to come up with better criteria!

I did have a problem with my credit record which I knew nothing about until I asked for a loan (this is all in the US, the Spanish credit system is completely different). I got rejected for having a low score; they wouldn’t let me look at the report (isn’t it my info?); I obtained a copy and it turns out that the only black mark was that a bank where I had never opened an account had closed an account opened by a gardening company, using my SSN, for lack of activity.

Leaving aside how surprised I am that having a bank account closed because it’s not moving makes such an impact: the name linked to the account wasn’t my name and the people at the bank were going all shades of grey and white when I went there to ask (politely but in a tone that said “give me any lip and I’m calling for your manager”) that they remove this line from my credit record, as it wasn’t mine. They said that there are two agencies which assign SSNs and there must have been a mixup. My own theory is that they never verified that the number they were getting really belonged to this company, but it led to a lot of problems which could have been much worse quite easily (for example, if I’d found out after moving to another city, and hadn’t been able to walk into the offending bank office).

[Nava]

Another one.

In 2003 I was based in Philadelphia, but spent about 80% of the year traveling. I didn’t have a cellphone; at one point I was going to spend 2 months in Mexico and one of my coworkers, nervous about me being “alone and defenseless” south of the Rio Grande for that long, gave me her company cell after checking with the boss and doing all necessary paperwork (number #### now belongs to person @@@@).

Coming back from Mexico, I get this bill for over $2K in calls from Mexico, the US and Canada (I have never been to Canada) to half a dozen countries. From a cell which hadn’t even been switched on except for this one time I did verify it got a signal. RITE.

I wrote explaining that, since the phone hadn’t been used at all, plus I haven’t called Chile or been to Canada in my life, they needed to check their records. They got nasty. Part of the nasty was upping things with my boss, who was definitely Not Happy when I showed her the list of phone numbers and gave her the only number I call international: Mom’s in Spain, which was not on the list. She was not. Happy. Last I know about this, she’d been up to Legal I’m sure the phone company has some big lawyers, but so did ours!

[Koxinga]

@The King of Soup

I’d like to recommend to everyone Stanley Elkin’s short story “I Look Out For Ed Wolfe.”

Phone debt collectors are essentially telemarketers selling personal misery, often to complete strangers who are astonished that anyone might think they were in the market. Their tactics are misleading and bullying and as shockingly brutal when they are mistargeted as a nun with an arrow through her head. But their targets, though often wrong, are not random or malicious, and few of us have compassionate feelings about the low-lifes who borrowed money from us and never paid it back.

Creditors should be more cognizant of the current era of personal portability, and if such were taken into account no doubt less money might have been lent to begin with, but it’s silly to pretend large financial corporations stuffed to the rafters with MBAs hadn’t calculated their P&L long ago, and so isn’t it a little dishonest to claim the right to use outrageous methods to recoup easily predictable losses, especially when the likelihood of actual repayment is remote?

Um, yes (I think: I may have lost track of the original question), but it’s still more dishonest to solicit goods and services and not pay for them. I like to think that as ubiquitous and scattershot as these calls are, the real deadbeats are getting terrorized by their fair share of them too. And they can’t easily shrug them off by proving their true, debt-ridden, identity.

I find your train of thought kind of difficult to follow, but bear in mind that the collectors likely have nothing to do with the original creditor. The original creditor would have sold off the debt for pennies on the dollar to specialized firms, for whom every cent of recovered debt is pure gravy. In short, they’re the scum and bottom feeders of the financial world. Like counterparts in nature, I’m sure they serve an important biological niche, but there’s nothing wrong with calling a maggot a maggot.