Complaint

0
Kelly
Country: United States
I received my collection notice on 5/18/07 staying that i owe $645.36 to Verizon new York, Inc with a disconnected # for Verizon new York. I called the toll free # (888) 257-1585 for Afni and waited on hold to speak to someone.

He never said his name until I asked before I told him why I was calling. Then told me it was from Oct 1999. Why am I getting this 8 yrs later? The account was under my maiden name for an address in Binghamton, NY under my SSN. I have never been to or lived in NY. Dad is a lawyer and he will be pointing me in right directions to stop this company, hopefully.

Comments

  • 0
    tj
    Odds are they got some old Verizon account, possibly owed by someone else with a name similar to your maiden name, and sent it to everyone they could find with a similar name in any state, including you.  Since it is unlikely that someone in NY would even have had access to your SSN to have actually opened an account in your name, since you never lived there, it is more likely that after deciding that you were on their list of people to send letters to, they pulled your credit report along with those of everyone else, and obtained your SSN and DOB to put on the "account" they created, either from credit reports or from the various databases they use for "skip-tracing".  

    That way they can tell you your SSN so you think they got it from Verizon with the debt information.  If they direct you to their website so you can file an online dispute, when you enter your last 4 digits of your SSN to make your complaint, that will appear to you to "verify" that this is actually your "account".

    They appear to prefer to create the appearance of even a fraudulently opened "id theft" account, rather than admit that what they actually are doing is sending bills to a lot of consumers with no connection to their alleged "debt".  This may be to evade the consumer's attempts to request validation, which they probably have no intention of obtaining as it will most likely just show you don't owe it.  

    As a "fraudulent account", they then try to shift the burden of proof back on you, claiming they have no duty to validate, and demanding costly (in terms of both your time and money) police report, notarized fraud affidavits, copies of your identification documents, proof of where you lived such as old leases, etc.  Whatever you send, they can probably find some gap in it to claim YOU haven't proved it is not your debt, especially since having not sent you any actual validation from the original creditor, you don't even have accurate details on the account such as the exact name it was opened in, documented address, dates, etc.  

    All the while you waist your time and money on an alleged debt they already know is probably not yours, that is too old to report, and probably past statute of limitations as well.  Faced with these ongoing costs, many consumers might just pay on their 50% offer, just to make this go away.  Possibly even several of the consumers contacted on the same debt might pay.

    They have just turned a cheaply bought bad debt, for which they had no legal or credit reporting recourse, owed by someone that couldn't be located, into profit without even having to show their cards.  The wrongly dunned consumers are actually more likely to pay this debt than the original debter ever was, since on average they are now sending their bills to consumers with good credit who want to preserve their reputations.  They just never validate, so they never have to "know" you aren't the debtor.  

    You deadbeat!  If you hadn't skipped out on this 8 years ago, or forgot to pay, you wouldn't have a debt collector after you now!
  • 0
    tj
    There are perhaps over 500 consumer reports on their tactics available thru various consumer complaint forums.  Thru these, you can observe their response to each dispute action a consumer might take on receiving a collection letter for a "debt" they don't recognize.

    Their responses appear to be carefully constructed, probably scripted and charted out, with indications that their employees have been trained in what they can say and get away with.

    In effect, they are following a minimax decision strategy in a two party zero sum game:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimax

    Since there is no improvement in payoff by accurately locating the correct debtor, and no penalty in erroneously dunning the wrong one, it pays to spend nothing on accurate skip tracing, and it pays to send out multiple letters on the same original "debt".

    There is also no improvement in payoff to spending anything on validation in response to a consumer dispute, since with many erroneous collection letters, accurate validation would show the consumer does NOT owe the debt.

    Since most of the debts are out of statute, and not legally reportable, in fact nothing pays more than attempting to apply pressure to whoever responds to their letters, whether they are the correct debtor or not.  If you respond in writing, and especially if you respond by phone, you are "in-play", accessible for purposes of pressuring to collect.  

    There is no requirement that any claim or assertion they make be accurate, or even that they believe it is accurate, since there is no penalty to them for being wrong.  They only need to preserve the possility of claiming that they made a bona fide error, or there was just some misunderstanding, to escape legal liability or reduce the likelyhood of attracting interest from a competent attorney willing to work on contingency.  

    If they ever send you anything, they just need to make sure it does not contain any obvious proof of their deceptive tactics that might be used in court.  But if they never send you anything, they can always back down later and claim they now "investigated" and are "closing the account", without ever admitting anything.  Plausible deniability is the operative concept.

    This is a modified zero sum game.  If you pay them, what they gain, you lose.  But they attempt to shift the apparent costs of not paying them, to shift your decision toward paying even if you owe nothing.  Thus, they spend little toward locating the right party, nothing toward validation, while attempting to convince you that your defence against their claim will be expensive and might cost as much as paying, and more when you consider your time.  If they actually validated all debts in response to consumer FDCPA disputes, these "debts" would probably not be profitable to collect on, even purchased as cheaply as they were.

    There is an element of a feint or "force" here, since by diverting you from the FDCPA specified consumer rights to validation, they redirect you to the path that will cost them nothing, while appearing to cost you substantially.  The reality appears to be that from the beginning they have no intention of proving this debt, especially if they mailed collection letters to a bunch of people with similar names, so their best play is to convince YOU that you have to disprove it or pay.
  • 0
    Rakesh R
    I got same message like this from a phone call....
    To my brother now they attached some photocopy of the person and he will be arriving at new delhi at
    morning..
    You have to pay only 24,000 thousand to get the gifts ...
    I can't believe that.. 24000 is abig money for me ...

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