We keep getting this phone call message left from Allied Debt Recovery, about half dozen times over the last week. They want us to call them back about some debt. They leave no name of ‘who’ they are trying to reach, etc. Just a number to contact them at.
First off we have zero debt other then our home mortgage and that is very current. I immediately pulled our credit reports and there is nothing there, etc.
My gut feeling is to NOT return this call. I just see it opening a Pandora’s box for us. I just see calling them they will escalate this since they now have a person to talk to–even if it isn’t the right person! I don’t want my phone tied to someone elses bad debt, etc.
So ignore the call? I figure eventually they will figure this is a dead end and stop calling. What say the masses?
How long have you had your phone number? I get plenty of debt collector calls as well and I’ve had my number for about 18 months. I just ignore them. I figure telling them not to call won’t do any good and they’ll eventually stop calling.
I ignored a collection agency who had been calling my house for months. They were looking for one of my sons. I don’t know how they got my number – our last names are different and he’s never lived here.
I finally caved and answered – told them he didn’t live here, had never lived here, and I didn’t know how to reach him. They stopped calling.
Your phone number is already associated with a debt that’s not yours, so I don’t know how it could be made worse if you talked to them and tried to straighten it out.
As much as I hate the cliche, “this.” Your phone number is linked, for some reason, with someone who owes this company (or one of its clients) money. Ignoring them is not going to disassociate your phone number with the account. Likely, you are on an autodialer. Until this company has reason to believe your phone number may not be the one for the debtor (ie, until you tell them), you’re probably not going to stop receiving calls. This information doesn’t simply “go away” because you ignore it; it will only go away when you give them reason to remove it.
These kinds of calls are always helped by talking to the company; they are quite happy to remove your number from their list, so they can concentrate on other ways of reaching their debt owner and stop wasting both their and your time. Typically, these are last-ditch collection agencies, and they’re throwing everything at the wall-- calling everyone with a vaguely similar name, or calling numbers that may have been linked to them once decades ago-- and are glad for even negative information, because they can begin narrowing their efforts.
I also can’t think of any downside to calling them, as long as you don’t give them any information about yourself. The upside is that they may stop calling.
Of course, you can just ignore them, but then they’ll keep calling.
Bolding mine. There was another thread here from someone who got a call like this. The collector said they needed his SS# to “look up his account”. Once he gave it to them, they were able to start garnishing his wages.
Definitely pick up the phone, at least once, to tell them it’s not you. Any legitimate collections company won’t want to waste time barking up the wrong tree and will leave you alone. But don’t give them any personal info just in case they’re not legitimate.
Holy shit. How did they get away with that? Did he eventually get them to stop?
I was getting calls like this for a while. I finally called and told them that the guy they were looking for didn’t live here. They were cool with that, but asked me what my address was. When I asked them who they were, they wouldn’t tell me. I just hung up.
My buddy has had his number for 6 years and gets phone calls from the same agency that he’s told to fuck off several times. Yes, he’s gone through all proper channels to get them to stop. He finally just changed his phone number.
Well, if the company wants to compensate me somehow for aiding in their efforts, fine. We can work out the details and as soon as the check they send me clears, we can talk and I’ll offer all the help I can. Otherwise, I ignore calls like this; or, if I happen to answer, I string them along.
I used to get calls a lot from one agency about a disputed debt. It was an actual “debt” in the sense that I had once used the service, a mobile phone company, for a business I used to run. The business has been closed for over 5 years now, but the only reason I didn’t pay them on this was because the phone service had charged me $800 I had in writing that they wouldn’t charge (connection fees) and when the business closed they said I owed them $300. By my accounting, they owe me $500, so I wasn’t going to pay them the $300 to get the collectors to stop calling. After some time, one of the collectors made some threatening and obscene remarks to me. I used a reverse look up to call back and talk to his supervisors and threatened to file a suit - they’re not allowed to threaten you. In the reverse search I found that they’d been reprimanded for this kind of behavior before. I got an apology from the supervisor and a promise to talk to/discipline the employee. Since then it’s been a few years without any calls. They will never get my $300 and I’ll never get my $500, but at least I’ve learned not to trust that company.
I read a reader’s digest article about this one time in the can. It said to answer the call and say “I am requesting proof of this debt in writing. I do not acknowledge this debt”. And yeah, don’t give them ANY info they don’t already have.
Of course, there is often a flurry of activity right around the time that your statute of limitations is going to run out. A couple years ago I had a debt company call me about 5 times a day for something like a straight month. I finally called them back, burned about 30 daytime minutes on hold, all to find out that I owed Blockbuster about $12.00 from several years ago. Later it occured to me they had spent more than my debt in their efforts to collect it.
We get these calls all the time for a particular sister-in-law who used to live in the upstairs apartment (and before that lived down the block) - and, on the rare occasion, for another SIL who didn’t live around here. So for the main SIL, we’re getting nailed in their “skip-tracing” databases both as relatives and as neighbors, and thus lots of calls.
Some call and leave no message when the machine picks up (I check the caller ID before answering a call), some leave a message. My husband was once home all day and answered their calls (about 4-5) hoping to get them to stop, and when he’d pick up, no one was on the phone and no one picked up within a reasonable amount of time of him waiting. Bad automated phone service, I guess. Some leave messages on our answering machine saying something like, “If you aren’t <Sister-in-Law>, hang up now; this is a business-related call for this person only. (pause) <Sister-in-Law>, by listening to this message you affirm that you are this person and you have officially received notice of a debt. Please contact us at <blah number>.” Yeah, I’m sure that’s totally legal. :rolleyes:
My husband gets annoyed every now and then and works to call them back and tell them they don’t have the right number and to knock it off, but I’m not sure it works. Either the debt keeps getting resold or she’s got a whole lot of debts out there, and probably both are true.
We got calls for a couple of weeks, that I finally returned to find out what was going on. The guy on the other end told me they were a legal firm, calling for some cousin of my husband’s. I told them he had never lived here, we had no connection with him, and asked why they were calling us. Actually, I said, “What did you do, go through the phone book and call anybody with our last name?” He said, “No, we don’t do that,” and tried to tell me that the cousin had lived in an apartment next door. There are no apartments next door. I asked for the address, but he wouldn’t give it to me.
The good part is that they only called one more time. We had the same conversation again, and they quit calling.
At the time I saw the thread it was still ongoing, but I forgot to check back so I don’t know how it ended up. I know at the time I was reading it, the guy was about to get foreclosed on because he could no longer pay his mortgage because the debt collector was taking so much of his money. Scary stuff. I think originally he thought it was a legitimate debt and they just had him confused with the debtor, but they kept it up even after he had proof sent in writing (from the company they said he originally owed the money to) that he didn’t owe the money.
This is the thread about the guy who gave out his SSN and then got his wages garnished, etc. I haven’t read all the new posts so you’d have to go through it yourself to find out what’s happening!
These ones KILL ME. What they’re essentially saying is, if you’re not so and so, you’re just going to have to deal with getting these calls multiple times a day, every day. Because if you listen to the message to get a number to call them back and tell them that you’re NOT that person and to stop calling, then you’re acknowledging that you ARE in fact that person, and the debt is yours.
If anyone knows Juanita Malave please let her know that several debt collectors are looking for her. In fact they have been calling my home and mailing letters to her for the past 8 years. I’ve lived in my home for 8 years and even the people that lived there before me did not know her.
I can’t make the calls stop since they come from all different sources. I’ve tried talking to the people, talking to their supervisors, talking to their bosses, and they all apologize and say they’ll take my number off their list. A couple weeks later the calls start again. I’d actually welcome the FBI come and search my home so they can let others know that I am honestly not hiding her here.
Now I just don’t pick up the phone if I don’t recognize the number. But they leave messages anyway looking for Juanita.
Thanks for that. I don’t know how I missed that thread. It looks like he only posted for three days, ending on Wednesday. I HOPE it’s because everything is going great for him, but as of his last post, it didn’t look like it.