Dillards Attacks
A couple of days ago we recieved a call from Dillard’s credit collection department about Sandra Tayler’s overdue account of $1100. The only problem is that I’ve never shopped at Dillard’s. Howard bought a suit there once, but the most I’ve ever done is walk through the store on my way into the mall. The collection people had my name, my phone number, but someone else’s address. We told them they’d gotten ahold of the wrong person, end of phone call. But the incident preyed upon my attention. Since identity theft is the popular crime these days, I decided to check my credit report. I surfed to annualcreditreport.com to get my free report. There are other sites which offer this service, but their “free” reports come with strings attached. My credit report was exactly how I expected it to be and there was nothing on it from Dillards. I breathed a sigh of relief and expected that to be the end of it.
Today I got two more phone calls. During the course of the phone calls I determined that the Sandra Tayler they are looking for has a different middle initial, different social security number, and lives in a different town. How they managed to attach my phone number to this other person’s account I’m not sure. I AM sure that there is no way they can legally stick me with that $1100 account payment. This is good news. The bad news is that credit collection agencies are notoriously persistant. They expect people to deny responsibility. They expect to be lied to. I’m afraid that I’m in for nuisance phone calls for quite awhile until they manage to actually track down this other person.
I’ve never been on the recieving end of credit collection before, does anyone know what tactics they may mistakenly attempt to appy to me while trying to collect from this other person?
EDIT: April 10, 2005 — The problem is resolved, they’ve stopped calling. Yay!