Harassment
Complaint
Debra M. Persiano
Country: United States
I got a call today at home from a man stating he was a process server for Collin County DA's Office and he is with the Sheriff's office and needed to come serve a warrant on me. I was shocked and asked why? He stated do you live ....are you still at this address are you now at this address and I stated who are you? He again, stated he was from the county going to serve court papers on me today. He gave me a toll free number for what he stated was the county's office which is 1 866.872.6116 gave me a case no. which he called a Cause No. 008307-TX. I called the number was transferred to a Mr. Fisher's office who stated that law suite in the amount of $6,214.24 was filed in Collin Co., Tx and that warrant was out for me. He then after back and forth said let me get more information from my secretary and state this was for an outstanding debt in from Capital One a credit card that I obtained several years back and had disputes over interest charges etc. He stated that if I did not want to go to court or jail that I could pay $1,951.00 in full by end of business today and this matter could be cleared up. I explained that I recently lost my job etc. Anyway, he stated that I needed to call him back by EOB today or they will serve the papers. Ok, so that was a heads up for me. I called the DA's office nothing is filed on me as of today, after searching PMG it is clear that they do not practice best practices for collections and have been in trouble for this before back in 2004. I need someone to give me advise. I want to pay off my debt, I don't want this type of collections to continue this upset me, made my blood pressure raise, this type of collections are not the right thing to do. Had they called and ask to make arrangements or give me an opportunity to clear the matter, rather then threaten me by taken legal action, or harassment stating they are sending a sheriff over today. This is wrong, bad business, and should not continue this company is bad news.
Comments
One scam, which bilked U.S. consumers out of some $5 million so far, involved about 8 million phone calls originating from India and being placed to American consumers over an eight-month period, the Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday.
In the first case of its kind in the United States, the FTC filed suit against American Credit Crunchers, related company Ebeeze LLC and their owner Varang K. Thaker, all related to a fraudulent debt-collection operation that somehow got ahold of the personal information of people who applied for loans through one or more payday lenders.
The alleged criminals, often pretending to be law enforcement or other government authorities, would falsely threaten to immediately arrest and jail consumers if they did not agree to make a payment on a delinquent payday loan. They demanded payment typically in amounts of about $500, authorities said. Some consumer complied even if they knew they didn't owe money, just to avoid a potentially embarrassing situation, authorities said.
So far, the FTC has received thousands of complaints from across the country about the scam. "We think we have a really serious problem," said C. Steven Baker, director of the FTC's Midwest Region based in Chicago. "As economies have globalized, so has fraud." A U.S. district court ordered the operation to halt and froze its assets while the FTC moves forward with the case.
According to the FTC's complaint, Thaker allegedly obtained information that often included Social Security or bank account numbers about consumers who had inquired about or applied for online payday loans. Thaker allegedly worked with telephone callers in India who called consumers using lies and threats to persuade them to pay debts that were not owed or that he was not authorized to collect.
"Nobody actually owed them a dime," Baker said.
Thaker could not immediately be reached for comment.
About 2 years ago, Indian fake debt collectors accounted for over half of collection agency complaints on this site. FTC finally sued one, but there are many, and any Indian with a phone or VoIP could run this scam.
This thread is primarily dedicated to the Corona Scam, that operated under many names, usually with mail drops in Corona or Lake Elsinore.
The Corona Scam was sued and raided by FTC, and their assets frozen and placed under the control of a court appointed receiver back in October 2011.
There are still several similar scams operating out of Southern California.
Soon....very soon........
What do you mean by "Those are Indian fake "payday loan debt collection" scammers."?
Don't appear to be operating out of southern California call centers.
Usually reported to have thick Indian or middle eastern accents, but use "plain English" sounding names.
Usually claim some "payday loan" is owed.
Usually make threats of immediate arrest.
Many pretend to be some sort of "federal investigators".
Have been reported to obtain consumer information via fake "payday loan application websites".
Many complaints of making threatening calls to people who never even had any payday loan.
Use wierd "investigation agency" names.
Call and harass victim, relatives, or coworkers.
Don't play the "process server calling relative, pretending to serve papers" game.
Engage in crude swearing when confronted.
Really pretty easy to tell them apart.
The court filings [PDF], a complaint seeking a temporary restraining order and freeze of company assets, claim that Orange County-based American Credit Crunchers LLC and affiliate Ebeeze LLC obtained personal information that people had entered in online payday loan applications.
Workers in Indian call centers then contacted consumers and claimed they were delinquent on a loan. The callers often impersonated law enforcement or government officials and threatened consumers with lawsuits and arrest, according to the filings. In reality, consumers did not owe the callers money. Victims of the scam often paid the company several hundred dollars.
The owner of the companies, Varang K. Thaker, could not be reached for comment.
The company assets have been temporarily frozen. If a judge finds in the FTC’s favor, the assets will be permanently frozen and redistributed to victims of the scam. The FTC also has passed along information on the case to Indian law enforcement, who theoretically could pursue legal action against the overseas call centers, said Elizabeth Scott, an attorney for the FTC’s Midwest region.
Mark Merola, who lives in a Florida retirement community, was one of the victims. The company called him continually, said his wife, Janice.”They said they were going to send cops and have him arrested,” she said.
Although Merola did not think he owed any money on a loan, he became scared and paid $523.87, according to the filings.
The threats of arrest were a red flag that the company was operating a scam, because no one can be arrested for outstanding debts, said Tena Friery, research director at the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that aims to educate consumers about privacy issues.
The FTC doesn’t yet know how the debt collection company obtained consumers’ personal information. Legitimate sites could have been hacked, or fake payday lending websites could have lured unsuspecting consumers.
But the information also might have been sold to American Credit Crunchers. Many payday lending websites are operated by lead generators, which are marketing firms that do not process loans. They simply sell application data to the highest bidder, said Jean Ann Fox, director of financial services for the Consumer Federation of America, an advocacy organization. Because they are not lenders, they don’t have to be licensed and don’t face the same regulations, she added.
“This is the Wild West of the loan market,” she said.
Copyright 2012 North County Times. All rights reserved.
So this group was in So. Cal, but used Indian call centers?
That would explain how the FTC could actually sue and sieze assets in U.S.
Still different from the Corona Scam.
So. Cal has become a cesspool of these scams.
Rather sad, really.
I thought most of that cr*p was in Buffalo.
"Many payday lending websites are operated by lead generators, which are marketing firms that do not process loans. They simply sell application data to the highest bidder,"
Basically identity theft websites.
We now have a alternate parallel universe, with fake loan application sites, trading in identity information under the guise of "loan leads", and fake debt collectors to collect fake debts.
Yet they share the real phone system, and the real money transfer system.
Indian and Pakistani call centers have also shown up at the center of fraudulent telemarketing operations, and "business directory" shakedown rackets.
The scammers of the world have also benefitted from global outsourcing.
Otherwise you just teach them how to get better.
Doesn't matter what names they use, they are easy to find.
Google site:800notes.com "serve" AND "papers"
gets them all.
They don't get away with posting fake shill posts anymore.
Maybe the next campaign should be against the cities that harbour them.
If they think there is "no problem", maybe they would like to be re-regulated, all because they chose to tolerate these bozos.
These scams wouldn't work well if they were cut off from the so-called legitimate business world.
They knew that from the start. That's why they had to establish some part of the organization as appearing to be "legitimate debt collectors", to get access to those services.
The Corona bunch will always be fly-by-nite, but Experian and Accurint have deep pockets.
So far, their whole business model has been built on "deniability", both for them, and for their customers. That goes back to the beginning of credit bureaus, and they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern, accountable world. They still reflexively block any accountability with every breath they take.
How would they like an investigation into who they are selling their data to, and what it's being used for?
How much bad press do they want?
This is a target-rich environment if you only look at it properly.
and get scammed by losers that can't find a way to make a honest dollar you are sadly mistaken.
Time is on our side and however long it takes one by one these debt collecting scams will be shut down.
Wait and see!!!!!!!!!!
What is left is a bunch of junk debt that clogs the courts, continuing to cost the taxpayers, or shows up in the hands of people like you, who then use it with negligence and deliberate malice to try and extort money out of the rest of us. These really old bad debts, cheaply bought by low-lifes, are more valueable as "get out of jail free" cards for shakedown rackets against "erroneously" skip-traced "debtors", than as some "debt portfolio" worthy of the name.
You are actually keeping your doors open, not on revenue from some legitimate debt collection business in compliance with the law, but from the "accidental" windfalls and made up "spiff money" when you con people who don't owe you. Take that away, and you can't operate. Operated legally, you're in the red, and you know it, or you wouldn't go to so much trouble to hide behind LLC shell games, evade ALL validation, or fabricate "plausible deniability" to shield the managers and owners from liability for all the phone cons.
You just don't get who is after you, who refuses to give up on bringing you down. You are not being tracked (and even sued, as in the Riverside case) by "deadbeats". Most consumers, maybe 90%, do not have delinquent debt, so when you play your "process server" game with your sloppy incompetent "skip-trace" guessing, when you make a "mistake", that is who you are threatening. When you try to con the 90%, some of the people you threaten are successful business people, professionals, even attorneys, and to them YOU are the true deadbeats. When you try to con and extort them, especially when you threaten their relatives, they get ANGRY. They want you out of business, broke, bankrupt, on the street, gone for good.
Your "collection agencies" are basically just organized crime, and we don't want them operating in our neighborhood, which is the whole U.S.
I am a professional AND a successful business person and I AM ANGRY. I want you out of business, broke, bankrupt, on the street, gone for good.
And I've been on your tail for going on two years now.....and I am oh, so close.
Oakland has serious problems with violent crime, even extending to within blocks of city hall. They aren't legally liable for that crime, but unless they get their act together, they will soon be known as a violent crime capitol, and people and businesses will leave. They are already sliding down the slippery slope.
A paramedic gets the [***] beat out of him attending a Giants/Dodgers game. Remains to be seen whether the courts decide the Dodgers have liability for the acts of the thugs that did it, but you can bet the Dodgers realize that if they don't deal with it, it will cost them value in their franchise, regardless of the outcome in the courts. LA police got the message, too. If they let it be known that LA is the place to go to games and have riots, they know they will get more of the same. It was a top priority to catch the thugs, so high they even got another parolee by mistake.
If you don't control crime (yes, conning and threatening people on the phone to get their money is crime), you get a reputation for permissive tolerance of more of the same, and those who want to do that congregate to your area. Probably why there are those 150-200 "offices" in the Corona area in the first place.
Corona police got complaints, walked into the Rincon site, nosed around, and walked back out. Maybe they need to learn from FTC what to look for.
And no, this wasn't just 1 out of 200. The Corona Scam might have been 1/4 to 1/2 of this type of activity in the area. They accounted for about 2/3 of the complaints on this site pointing to Southern California, and the complaint rate was substantially reduced after they were raided. Looks like they had at least 35 LLCs, maybe more, and they were starting to export their "franchise" to other states (like Iowa).
The impact of the raids even appears to have spilled over to other operations like CMAG. The other operations got the message, or at least decided it was best to lay low for a while.
Fraud is spread culturally, by the "training" that newer employees get in the older operations. Bagley and Lunsford learned the same way, before they set out on their own. You can't stop it all, but if you let it keep growning, you get a much larger problem to eventually deal with.
Case in point: Buffalo NY.
Two, maybe three years ago, complaints started showing up here, similar to the Corona complaints, but the locations were hard to pin down.
Following the Dateline series that tracked down the Boyland operations to the Buffalo area, New York AG started focussing on debt collection practices in NY. They found numerous problems not only with shady debt collectors running basically the same shakedown rackets as the Corona Scam, but even rampant sewer services used by law firms to get default judgements. About 100k judgements were thrown out.
Florida was a similar case. Two, maybe three years ago, there were numerous similar rackets running out of the Jacksonville FL area. Again, similar complaints were showing up here, under several names, again with the location difficult to pin down. FL AG went after several (Ellis Crosby, Bass, etc.), and you don't hear the same level of complaints any more.
Yes, it takes 2 to 3 years to get FTC to go after the larger of these rackets. It took about that long to go after CAMCO, first with a large fine and injunction, then shutting them down. The states should be doing it sooner themselves, controlling crime within their jurisdictions. California decided to let down their guard, and stopped regulating debt collectors a number of years ago, and this is a result. If it doesn't want to be known as the place to go (when you get driven out of New York or Florida), maybe they better start regulating again, requiring licensing and bonding.
Actually, if we abolish 3rd party collections entirely, that might go a long way toward reducing crime. If nothing else, it would force original creditors to take compromising with their financially strapped customers more seriously.
Plaintiffs' attorneys could be sure they would be paid off when they win, so consumers could more easily get representation to sue for illegal collection.
The fly-by-nites would either have to pay higher rates for bonding, or be frozen out of business, rather than endlessly changing names as they pretend to be operating legally. And if the cops walk in to some new boiler room, they better have their license in order, with bonding verifiable through the state, or they can be prosecuted. We expect no less from casinos.
The costs would be pushed where they belong, on the industry itself, and mostly on the worst offenders.
Legitimate agencies would benefit from lower costs to purchase portfolios now no longer bid up by overleveraged fly-by-nites planning on using illegal harassment and extortion hiring idiots off the street as dupes. The portfolio market value would more accurately reflect its value when collected legally, with the overhead of compliance and validation, rather than its current inflated value as an excuse to extort whoever you want to call.
There is no reason to tolerate illegal collection.