Bogus bill collectors on the prowl

Herb Weisbaum • Profile • E-mail

One of the most important things I try to do with this column is warn you about rip-offs and scams.

There are so many of them and new ones keeping popping up like weeds.

Here are two you should know about.

Bogus bill collectors target pay day loan customers

These phony debt collectors harass their victims and try to scare them into paying thousands of dollars they don’t owe.

Danielle Vukonich, 31, who works for a well-known restaurant chain in Seattle, recently got one of these calls at work.

“It was really, really scary,” she recalls. “He was really threatening. He said I was getting charged with various crimes and I could be arrested.”

Vukonich says the caller identified himself as an “officer” with the “Federal Investigation Authority” (There is no such agency.) He claimed she owed money on a payday loan from 2007 and he wanted her to settle up for $1,800 right then. He was willing to take a credit card or bank account number, or she could wire transfer the money.

Vukonich knew she’d paid back the loan and didn’t let the caller bully her into paying. But since the scammer called her at work, she had to let her manager know what was going on, in case this guy called again and she wasn’t there.

“It was totally embarrassing,” she tells me.

Now here's the really disturbing part: These debt collector con artists have a lot of personal information about the people they’re calling.

“They know their Social Security number, home address and phone numbers,” says Alison Southwick with the Council of Better Businesses Bureaus. “They even know the names and numbers of friends and family which makes it extremely frightening.”

How could the bad guys get all this information? Some suspect a data breach or an insider who steals the information and sells it to the crooks.

“Cobbling together all that information from external sources can be done, but it’s not as efficient as stealing large bulks of it from someone,” notes John Ulzheimer, president of consumer education at credit.com.

A variety of nasty things can happen if you truly owe money to a company and don’t pay. You can be sued, kicked out of your house or have your wages garnished.

But Ulzheimer points out, “You cannot be arrested or you cannot go to jail for owing a debt.”

If someone threatens that, you can be sure it’s a con artist or shady collection agent.

PROTECT YOURSELF: If you get a call from someone who claims you owe money and your response should be, “I won’t do anything until you send me proof of the debt in writing.”

Do not verify any of your personal information the caller already has and do not provide any more.

You also want to know where the debt originated, so you can contact that company directly to see if the collector is legit. If it’s a crook on the line and you ask these questions, chances are he’ll hang up and you’ll never hear from him again.

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