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Dorchester woman says debt collectors won't leave her alone, even though she's not the woman they want

A Dorchester woman has gotten so sick of what she says are incessant calls from a debt-collection company over some other woman's debts that she's sued to make the calls stop.

In a lawsuit filed yesterday in US District Court in Boston, the woman says that even if she were the person who owes money, the repeated calls from Federal Bond and Collection Service, Inc. of Hatboro, PA are harassment and violate the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.

The Defendant's representative advised that it was calling for a "Rosa Linda."

Plaintiff is not Rosa Linda nor does she know Rosa Linda.

In early December of 2013, during one of the calls, Plaintiff informed Defendant that it was calling the wrong person and asked Defendant to cease further calls.

Nevertheless, the calls continued to Plaintiff's home phone.

Sought: $1,000 recompense plus lawyers' fees.

Ed. note: I sympathize. There's a deadbeat down in the Taunton area whose name is just one middle initial different from my wife's. Even though she's in Taunton and has a different Social Security number, her credit record keeps getting appended to my wife's, and we get periodic calls from a debt-collection agency seeking to collect. Even worse was a couple years back when our bank told us it would reject our mortgage refinancing because of our "bad" credit, and I had to drive all the way down to Taunton to dig up the other woman's court records and then convince the credit agency that had downgraded us that that woman was not my wife - thank goodness it was Taunton and not, say, Seattle.

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Comments

You can stop this by writing to the three credit agencies and say, "never get my name mixed up with person X from Y". It works, had it happen to me once to many times and did this years ago. Haven't had a problem since.
But what to do with those unending unwarranted credit phone calls ...?

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The one agency that had conflated our data unconflated it and we got the refinancing.

But yeah, the calls (or sometimes letters, now that I think of it) come often enough (once every few months) to be annoying, but not to the point of hiring a lawyer (every single time, the debt collector will say they'll take my wife's name out of their database; don't know if they're lying or they keep getting our address from a new source).

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Because per FDCPA, the violator is liable for all fines paid to the victim as well as all legal fees. About ten years ago, I was being harassed by a "creditor" law firm that bought a debt that I had paid off years before. They called my brother's bakery (where I used to work) and discussed the matter with him and then proceed to contact me after I told them not to call me and asked them to verify the debt (which is an important tool to stop them, usually -they need to be able to verify that the debt is valid -which they couldn't). I hired a lawyer after they called my brother and they ended up paying about $3000 on a debt (fine for violation and related legal fees), had it been valid the debt would have been under $700. Had I proceeded in Court, they would have been liable for at least four violations (I think the violations were for calling an employer, calling after hours, third party discussion and contact after a verification request was made, all at $1K each) and all legal fees. After that I never heard about it again.

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Gotta love a system where our financial fates are determined by a number created by three faceless credit reporting agencies.

Especially when one of those companies was caught selling our personal information to identity theives, and then still has the gall to run commercials trying to sell us identity theft protection.

http://www.informationweek.com/attacks/experian-sold-data-to-vietnamese-...?

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My favorite... I get the calls for past tenants of my building because I have the only active land line at the address. Not as bad as it once was, but I still get some.

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Are there any websites that describe what to do in this situation?

When it happened to me, I tried to do some research before talking to the debt collector. All the websites I found were aimed at people who actually owed money, not people who were mistaken for someone else.

(As it turned out, I quickly convinced the collector that I wasn't the person with my name in my city they were looking for. That fixed the problem. But other people don't solve the problem so easily.)

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