Was my sister about to recieve a summons?

I was just at her house and she recieved two unknown calls. One was an 866 area code, and the other had a different area code that wasn’t ours. I had to leave a few minutes after she recieved the calls. I didn’t think anthing of it until I was pulling out the drive way, I saw a vehicle turning on our street. I drove the opposite direction. I looked back and noticed the vehicle slowed by my sister’s house, and then kept on going. It then turned onto the next street, which made no sense, because going up that street wouldve sent the back to the original direction they came from, making a loop.

I have no idea if the calls and vehicle are connected. If they are, why? The only thing I can come up with is a summons. But it was 8:30 pm. They only send summons during business hours, right?

It could be that she was about to receive a summons. But it could be a lot of things, including sheer coincidence.

In Ohio, summons and subpoenas can be served at all hours, although they tend to be during daytime just because that’s when the bailiffs and process-servers are usually working.

Why, if they were going to give your sister a summons, would they not stop completely at her house, get out, and knock on the door? More broadly, if your sister was about to get a summons, what stopped it from happening?

Is she expecting a summons? That wouldn’t be the first thing that came to my mind in this situation.

I was maybe thinking that they thought that I was her. Yes, she has been threatend by a collector for unpaid cc bills. She was sending in payments but not the complete amount.

When those people called tonight. She answered the phone, but they wouldn’t talk nor hang up.

I wouldn’t want someone handling a summons who would just turn around because they saw a car was leaving. It takes maybe a minute to go out and knock on the door to check.

I think it much more likely you saw someone who was lost. They slowed down to check and see if that was the right house. Then they realized they had gone one street too far.

As for the phone call–if they were calling to see if she was home, why wouldn’t they actually hang up?

“Get out of there NOW! The car is coming from inside the house!”

Your imagination has gone wild.

Next time record the unknown number and do a Google search on it. It might turn out to be a wrong number, a sales/marketing call, or one of those phone spam outfits (most likely). As for the unknown vehicle, next time change your plans. Go back and record the license number, and vehicle make and model if you are that concerned.

As for answering the phone and receiving no response, just hang up. (Also, read up on your legal rights about debt collection. ) Caller ID should offer the number and run the same Google search on it. If the calls continue, report it to the phone company and the police. Once the police have a report (insist they take a report!), that can be used to require the phone company to install a trace on the line. Despite Hollywood writer games, phone traces are instantaneous once a connection is made. There’s no need to keep the line open for 60 seconds. Hollywood does that for dramatic effect. Quite possibly they also do it obfuscate the realities of phone tracing to actually help real police in real situations because so many criminals actually believe actual police work is just as stupid as Hollywood makes them out to be. (In some cases, the real police are actually dumber as well.)

I’ve heard of that happening with telemarketers who use autodialers. Essentially for every number they dial, they have a very low expectation that anyone will pick up, so to save time, they have a machine that dials many numbers at once, and if someone picks up on any one of those calls, that person gets connected to the telemarketer.

They pick the number of calls to make at once so that statistically they still expect that the vast majority of the number of people who will answer is either zero or one, but in the rare case that more than one person answers, only one of them gets the telemarketing pitch and the others get a call like the one your sister got.

Certainly someone issuing a summons need not engage in such BS, although I suppose they might lie about why they’re calling (pretend it was a wrong number or some such) so someone trying to avoid a summons would not be tipped off.