fraudulent billing
Complaint
Hope R. Stewart
Country: United States
ANFI has 2 collections on my credit report. After speaking with "alma" on the phone, she said there was nothing I could do except to pay the bills....problem is...I've never had the phone services "alma" claims I did. No detailed billing to be sent. No way to dispute bill and get it off my credit report without paying...this is soooo unethical and unprofessional....perhaps the court system will be my next step.
Comments
"she said there was nothing I could do except to pay the bills"
"No way to dispute bill and get it off my credit report without paying..."
FDCPA requires debt collectors to provide proof of alleged debts when requested within 30 days, or cease collection until they do. Failure to follow FDCPA is a violation of federal law. Claiming there is "nothing you can do but pay them" is an attempt to deceive you into believing you have no right to dispute and request validation of an alleged debt.
If you dispute their "erroneous" reporting of a debt on your credit report with the credit reporting agency, the credit reporting agency is required to "investigate" the information, asking AFNI whether it is accurate. If AFNI "verifies" it as accurate when it is not, you can sue AFNI for doing so.
You do NOT have to pay AFNI to dispute their errors, nor will paying them get their credit reporting errors removed from your credit reports. On the contrary, you may find yourself with someone else's bad debt on your credit report for the next 7 years, just for the trouble of paying AFNI for a debt you don't owe.
Use of deception by a debt collector to collect debts is itself a violation of FDCPA, including telling consumers they do not have the dispute and validation rights that they are required by FDCPA to notify consumers that they do have.
You should know that:
1) They have sent a lot of bills to people who don't owe them, generating a high amount of consumer complaints,
2) They have to follow FDCPA and FCRA, or you can sue them,
3) The Minnesota AG has sued them,
4) Their BBB rating went from "satisfactory" to "unrated" when the Minnesota AG lawsuit was filed,
5) The Illinois AG is reported to be investigating them,
6) The New York AG is reported to be investigating them.
AFNI and Verizon (source of most of the "old telecom debts" AFNI has been collecting on recently) are associated with the highest number of consumer "id theft" complaints filed with FTC in 2007 of ALL companies, consistent with their common tactic of suggesting that consumers who believe they don't owe alleged "debts" must either pay them or file "id theft" complaints. They appear to be using the "pay us or prove it is id theft" tactic to extract payment from people they have sent bills to through supposed "misidentification" or sloppy skip-tracing, trying to shift the burden of proof to the consumer, contrary to FDCPA.
That is why you ALWAYS:
1) Dispute IN WRITING, sent certified return receipt requested.
2) File complaints with FTC, your state AG, and the state AG of the transgressor whenever they break the law, sending copies of your disputes and proof of receipt.
3) Tolerate no threats or excuses. Document violations in your reply letters, with copies sent to FTC and state AGs.
Don't waste your money paying debts you do not owe, since they will not fix your credit. You are better off suing once you can prove violations, so keep good records, and take action as soon as you have enough evidence to prevail.
Treat it as the systematic racket that it is.
1) Those with a similar name to the original name on the alleged account. They appear to just match last names approximately, often ignoring first names, making no attempt to further check identity.
2) Those who may have lived at the address of an alleged account, even if at a different time from when the account was open. They sometimes claim these are "identity theft", yet demand payment unless the consumer can prove it.
3) There are reports of billing people who currently have the same phone number of some old alleged phone account. Their justification isn't clear. When consumers state their phone account is current and in good standing, they have been reported to attempt to rebutt this by claiming they are in a so-called "minimum pay" state, basically implying the consumer cannot depend on the accuracy of their own phone bill to know whether they owe a debt.
4) There are some indications that they sometimes attempt collection on billing errors previously resolved with original creditors, either original creditors may be erroneously sending them invalid collection accounts, or they may be selling charged-off account information en-mass, leaving it to AFNI to determine which accounts are true bad debts and which are unowed billing error writeoffs. AFNI appears to be just billing everyone.
A little over a year ago, they bought several million old alleged "debts" from Verizon, left over from Verizon's various mergers with other telecom companies. Verizon's records were already questionable, having been transferred from other businesses, and these "accounts" appear to have included not just bad debts, but other write-offs such as for correcting billing errors. In addition, since the mergers happened about a decade ago, the debtors' addresses are often no longer valid due to moves, and since this is the most direct way to easily confirm correct identity, they in many cases have no idea who owes these debts or where they live.
In selling this junk, Verizon probably stipulated they had no obligation to provide validation. It wouldn't pay for AFNI to request it anyway, for only a few hundred dollars, on debts over a decade old and out of statute so they can't sue, when they already know a substantial number of their letters have been sent to the wrong person. AFNI's solution is to collect as cheaply as possible, sending letters to anyone their computers can "match" in various databases, and then let their employees deceive the many irate callers that result from all the "errors".
Just act indignant, and avoid "knowing" you are demanding payments from the wrong people. Sound authoritative, and make up some excuses to overcome the many objections. Whatever you do, never admit what you are doing is wrong. If you can't con one person, move on to the next. There are a lot more "debts" to go through.
In the mean time, many people get their credit trashed for "debts" they never had any connection to, and some end up paying them. Some of the victims are kids who have just turned 18 and are going off to college, only to find their student loans blocked by phony allegations they somehow opened a phone account when they were 8. Some are soldiers in Iraq, whose spouses have to deal with this crap while they are off fighting to protect us. Some are homeowners trying to refinance their mortgages, only to find their credit ratings trashed.
In the mean time, AFNI holds themselves out as a shining example of the responsible corporate citizen, member of the BBB, sponsoring local sports teams, parnering with BBB on "identity theft education" days, sterling examples of the highest ethics of the debt collection industry.
If they were even required to validate debts (producing documentation from the original creditor) on request within 30 days, instead of just passing the junk on to another, it would make harassing the wrong parties unprofitable.
The problem occurs when they demand money from the wrong people, and use abusive and deceptive tactics to get payments. That isn't "debt collection", it's just fraud and extortion.
There is little material difference between such thugs, and some boiler room con artist defrauding old ladies out of their retirement savings. They both deserve the same prison sentence.