Scam Collectors
Complaint
Diana Welling
Country: United States
Today is 2/26/2008 and on 2/25/08 I had just received a bill from Afni stating I owe on an old Verizon account; in the amount of $90.86 and that they will settle for $45.43. The account number they claim is for a Verizon phone number.
This is very interesting because I have never had Verizon.
I have never had this bill show up on any past credit reports.So I checked my credit current reports and found them listing that I owe them.
I paid for a search on the phone number they listed and I am not connected to that number. I called Verizon California Inc. and spoke to Eric, he said that it wasn't even a Verizon number and they had no records of me on any account!
I visited Budd Hibbs and Rip off report on the WWW only to find out that this agency was scamming me.
I am really upset about this bogus claim on my credit report and have never had the phone number they claim I had, nor have I ever had a Verizon account. I owe nothing to Verizon or these people and I am not giving them one red cent.
I want an apology from Afni, Inc on their letter head signed by their owners and managers; and I want them off my credit report as well as print outs at their expense of the corrected credit reports.
What gives them the right to steal my identity and make up a bogus bill?
How many more California people have been scammmed by this outfit?
Someone needs to shut these type of rip off artists down and fine them big time.
This is very interesting because I have never had Verizon.
I have never had this bill show up on any past credit reports.So I checked my credit current reports and found them listing that I owe them.
I paid for a search on the phone number they listed and I am not connected to that number. I called Verizon California Inc. and spoke to Eric, he said that it wasn't even a Verizon number and they had no records of me on any account!
I visited Budd Hibbs and Rip off report on the WWW only to find out that this agency was scamming me.
I am really upset about this bogus claim on my credit report and have never had the phone number they claim I had, nor have I ever had a Verizon account. I owe nothing to Verizon or these people and I am not giving them one red cent.
I want an apology from Afni, Inc on their letter head signed by their owners and managers; and I want them off my credit report as well as print outs at their expense of the corrected credit reports.
What gives them the right to steal my identity and make up a bogus bill?
How many more California people have been scammmed by this outfit?
Someone needs to shut these type of rip off artists down and fine them big time.
Comments
They are known for sending bills to kids when they turn 18, claiming they opened and are responsible for accounts supposedly opened 10 to 15 years earlier. They have been known to send bills to people who once lived at some address related to an account, but never even had their name on some account. You can find many reports on-line that if you call they will try to deceive you into paying even debts that are not yours, claiming they don't have to validate debts, claiming you have to prove it is not yours, etc. In many cases, people report they have their SSN and DOB, on accounts they never heard of, in cities they never lived in, even during periods when they were out of the country, where true "id theft" is unlikely.
Since they have put false negative information on your credit reports, you would be wise to take this seriously, proceeding in a manner that allows for legal action and recovery of damages should they fail to remove it. At this point, just paying them thinking your credit damage will then go away will leave you with their false damaging information on your reports until it finally falls off after 7 years after the alleged original debt.
Since they have put it on your reports, they are acting as if it is more recent than 7 years, which should put later than the many reported debts originating from Verizon's purchase of other phone companies. That also makes it more likely that Verizon's determination the account is invalid or not theirs is probably accurate, or alternatively it may actually be an old pre-Verizon account from the 1990's that AFNI has illegally re-aged.
First send a letter disputing the debt, indicating that this is not your account, and requesting that they send you proof of the debt from the original creditor. Send this letter certified return receipt requested. If they continue to attempt to collect from your, after receiving your validation request sent within 30 days of receiving their first collection letter, but before sending you validation of the debt, they are in violation of FDCPA, and you may sue them for continued collection without validation.
When you confirm their receipt of your letter, send disputes to the credit reporting agencies showing their false information, disputing that information, indicating that it is not your debt. Again, send these dispute letters certified return receipt requested. The credit reporting agency is then supposed to check with AFNI, who is supposed to verify, correct, or remove the disputed information. If they fail to remove erroneous disputed information, you may then proceed to sue them for their violation of FCRA.
Keep in mind you can't accept just some letter they themselves send claiming they checked with Verizon, who says it's your debt. You already know it isn't your debt, and you already checked with Verizon. In a few cases they might actually have some account opened thru id theft, in which case you proceed to file a police report, and send copies of that and a fraud affidavit to them and the credit reporting agencies to get it removed.
Often, however, knowing they have sent these bills to lots of erroneous names, they actually try to steer you toward handling it as a "fraudulent account". Then they start placing barriers in your way, demanding all sorts of documentation and identification, while refusing to provide any information on the account that would assist you in disproving you owe it. Their goal is to wear you down so you think it is cheaper to just pay them money you don't owe.
When you pulled your credit reports, did you find their inquiry listed on one, indicating they pulled your credit report? If so, don't be surprised when they claim your SSN is associated with the alleged account, since your credit report would provide that to them even when it wasn't part of the original account. If they pulled your credit reports, and the original account wasn't even in your name, you may have additional violations of FCRA, essentially for pulling your credit reports without permissible purpose.
Pretty much whatever they say cannot be trusted, so don't expect to resolve this with a simple phone call. You keep your communications in writing, sent certified return receipt requested, in case you need to use it later in court. You would also be wise to view anything they send with scepticism. Sometimes the deception is in what they leave out.
In fact, there are only really two paths of interest to you: 1) they drop collection attempts and remove the information from your reports, or 2) you proceed with attorney general and FTC complaints, and send the matter to a competent attorney. Under FDCPA and FCRA, a court can award not only damages but also your attorneys fees.
There are a number of attorneys with experience in FDCPA and FCRA litigation who have sued them, and they have a reputation for settling when confronted. In addition, they have also been reported to respond to complaints sent thru the Illinois Attorney General.
This showed up on answerbag via Google search:
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/597566
" I am a business reporter for Gannett Newspapers and I am interested in speaking with people who have had problems with AFNI?Verizon. I can be reached at adrury@thejournalnews.com or at 914-694-5069. "
Since there are comments dated 2-13-08, this is a recent request. The name and phone number check out, and match other stories by Allan Drury, as for example, here:
http://burbsbiz.lohudblogs.com/author/adrury
http://lohudmoms.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080215/MOMS02/302110003
If you are having, or have had problems with AFNI's collections methods, and you would like to talk to a business reporter apparently working on a story on the subject, you might contact him:
Allan Drury
The Journal News
adrury@thejournalnews.com
914-694-5069
Gannett Newspapers publishes a number of newspapers, including USA Today.
http://www.gannett.com/web/newspapers.htm
It addresses the problems of bogus bills being sent to many "misidentified" consumers, including a sampling of the Federal court cases in New York state against AFNI confirming that complaints are heavily skewed in this direction.
AFNI's "satisfactory" BBB rating is noted, despite high levels of BBB complaints that BBB does not consider "unusual".
New York State Public Service Commission actually referred a consumer to complaintsboard.com for confirmation of many similar complaints. That would appear to imply that there is a NY investigation underway, consistent with other reports, but on which they are not directly commenting.
Two consumer cases cited in detail.
One appears to be a "misidentification" due to a similar name, consumer never lived at address or had that phone number, yet they had her SSN, claiming they "got it from public records found by Google".
Google isn't actually an effective way to routinely find SSNs of particular persons, even if you can occasionally find documents containing them, since most people do not have their SSNs on webpages searchable by Google, even thru data breaches of "public records". This "explanation", which AFNI so glibly offered along with the consumer's SSN, is NOT adequate to account for the high fraction of "misidentified" consumers that similarly have reported that AFNI had their SSNs.
AFNI is already reported as routinely pulling credit reports, sometimes 6 months ahead of sending out their letters, so they already have direct access to SSNs. May also be a reference to their use of Lexis-Nexis, which collects information from public records.
Probably deceptive collection to disguise the source, since who would believe having their SSN "proved" they owed a debt if they knew any debt collector could just pull credit reports without already having SSNs and thru that obtain SSNs. Fits into leading the consumer to the "pay it or deal with id theft" path. They may have other reasons to steer consumers away from awareness that their credit reports were pulled, particularly if they have been "misidentified".
Also touches on conclusions by consumers that AFNI is billing people connected to some account only by having once lived at a related address.
We even get a glimpse of the "AFNI culture" through the words of their compliance manager, with the same focus on minimizing costs for the company visible in their shotgun collection tactics, costs to the consumer be damned.
All in all, well researched, and well written.
http://www.lohud.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080227/BUSINESS01/802270322
<quote>
Chappaqua woman battling bill for phone number she never had
By Allan Drury
The Journal News • February 27, 2008
Irene Levine has never lived in Manhattan or had a phone number with a 212 area code.
That's why she can't figure out why she got a bill from a collection agency that says she owes Verizon Communications Inc., the giant phone company, $1,039.92 in unpaid bills from 1998 to 2000.
Levine has company in having a complaint about Afni Inc., the collections company. Afni has been involved in 103 federal lawsuits since the start of 2005 and many of those were filed by consumers who claimed the company, which is based in Bloomington, Ill., tried to bill them unfairly.
Nine lawsuits were filed by New Yorkers. Of those, eight claimed Afni tried to collect debts they never incurred and one alleged the company sent the plaintiff a deceptive collections notice.
The Better Business Bureau has processed 1,107 complaints against the company the past three years, including 760 in the past year.
But the bureau said Afni has a "satisfactory record," meaning it has resolved all the complaints filed by consumers. The company does not have an "unusual volume of complaints or any government actions involving its marketplace conduct," the bureau said.
Debra Ciskey, director of compliance for Afni, said she believes the number of complaints against the company is small, given the huge number of contacts the company has with consumers.
"I would say we do the best job we possibly can," she said. "Making mistakes costs us money. We're prefer to work with the person who actually owes the debt."
But she acknowledged the company's "skip-tracing" - the process of locating people who owe bills may have moved, changed their name, or disconnected their phone - sometimes leads it to consumers who don't really owe.
Afni encourages those who receive collections notices and who believe they do not owe the debt to write to the company, she said.
Ciskey said Afni bought a debt portfolio from Verizon within the past 18 months. She said Verizon certified that the debts on the list were legitimately owed.
The debts in the portfolio go back to the 1990s and include bills that were owed to Verizon's corporate predecessors, she said.
Though the company seeks to keep mistakes to a minimum, errors cause frustration and anxiety for consumers who receive notices they should not have received.
Levine, a professor at the New York University School of Medicine who lives in Chappaqua, said she received her notice about six weeks ago from Afni claiming she owed the money.
She said that after calling Afni by phone a number of times and getting no answer, she wrote to the company asking for proof that she owed the money. She said she got a confusing letter back.
The letter, dated Feb. 8, said the company would stop its communication with her regarding the debt. But the letter also said Afni "validated the account with the original creditor," which was Verizon.
Baffled and concerned about her credit rating being affected, she called the company two weeks ago and spoke with a representative who told her the bill was for an address in Manhattan. The representative provided Levine with a phone number, but Levine said she never had that phone number. The representative also indicated the bill was for a person with the last name "Levin" - one letter off from Levine's name.
But more alarming to Levine was that the representative told her that Afni had her Social Security number and read her actual Social Security number to her. Levine said the representative told her Afni got her Social Security number by using Google to pull up public records on the Internet.
"She said, 'That (Social Security) number (matches) this phone number and because of that, it's your bill,' " Levine recounted. "I said, 'This must be some kind of fraud because I never lived in Manhattan, and I never had that phone number.' "
Levine said she then called the state Public Service Commission, where a representative told her there were numerous complaints against the company. The representative advised her to check a consumer Web site (www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/afni-collections-c5787.html), she said.
That board contains numerous complaints from consumers who say Afni sent them collection notices for phone numbers they never had.
Levine said this week that she had not heard from the company since the Feb. 8 letter. But she said she checked her credit and the phantom debt has not caused her credit rating to suffer.
An expert on personal finance said it is common for debt collectors to send people bills in error and the mistakes frequently occur because a person has a similar or same last name to the person who owes.
Harrine Freeman, the chief executive of H.E. Freeman Enterprises LLC of Bethesda, Md., said collectors can also get tripped up by similar Social Security numbers.
Spelling errors and address errors are also common and can lead to someone getting a bill they shouldn't get, Freeman said, noting that studies indicate 70 percent of all credit reports contain at least one mistake.
Judith Wagner, a saleswoman from Corona del Mar, Calif., said in an interview she received a notice in November saying she owed $27.30 for Verizon California Inc. service that she had in Laguna Beach. She said she lived in a rental house in Laguna Beach for about 18 months in the early 1990s but never had the phone number that was listed on the collection notice.
She wrote to the company and has not heard back, she said. But she said that given the large number of consumers with complaints about the company, she fears for those who get notices for larger amounts than her and pay the phantom debt.
Wagner said her theory is that someone at her former address in Laguna Beach had the phone number and owes the debt, but Afni saw the connection between her and the address and sent her a bill.
"I think their logic is completely flawed," she said. "I think they know it and they don't care."
Reach Allan Drury at adrury@lohud.com or 914-694-5069.
<end quote>
http://dockets.justia.com/search?query=afni&s ... ases=mostrecent
Maybe he also searched state cases.
http://dockets.justia.com/search.py?query=afn ... yes#resultslist
AFNI's tactics, widening their search on all parameters (name, address, etc) is more likely to find people who are already findable, and erroneously find them to the extent they are findable. Thus their "mistakes" will more likely turn into "erroneous bills" that they claim are correct with people who are easily findable when the original "debtor" is not, a population that is probably lower than average in delinquent debt.
This is the opposite from what would happen if they actually tried to accurately "skip-trace" to find the correct person, narrowing the search to reduce the number of wrong matches, combining information to reduce the chance of error. The same type of Lexis-Nexis information that allowed them to "trace" Judith to an account address, even if erroneously linking her to a bill, would have shown Irene had no connection to the Manhattan address, but since these are probably totally automated text matches, on 5 million alleged debts, there is no real intelligence operating behind this billing.
Hence the extreme skewing of consumer complaint statistics toward "not my debt", despite AFNI's lame claim it might be "id theft".
This is the primary difference between AFNI's definition of consumer identity, and, say, the credit reporting agencies' definition, who despite their problems, have to actually try to discriminate between different people based on what separates them to produce useful data to their customers. It actually matters to credit report customers that different individuals credit files get mixed up. To AFNI, ANY match that produces a payoff is useful, and their responses to consumer complaints of misidentification reflect this.
As Ms. Ciskey noted, "We're prefer to work with the person who actually owes the debt." Apparently that is only a preference, as any respondent will do.
http://dockets.justia.com/search.py?query=afn ... yes#resultslist