A reader tells us how he got a debt collector who kept calling looking for someone else to stop calling, by turning the privacy invasion tables on him and freaking him out.
“Washington Mutual kept calling my phone for the past 3 weeks, about 10 times a day and I usually just hang up. But this time I made the person identify himself, where he was at…”
“While I had him on the phone, I looked them up on zabasearch.com [a free people-finder search engine] and confirmed where he lived and his phone number He was like, “What are you doing?”
“I am gonna have everyone else call you and see how you like it,” I said. “Maybe submit your info to telemarketing companies or whatever else I feel like doing if you keep it up.”
When I read him his address and phone number he was soo confused. Then he got pissed and said they will stop calling and hung up.”
LOL, hilarious. We can talk all we want about filing police reports, filing small claims lawsuits over breaking the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, but sometimes there’s nothing more effective than a good ol’ fashioned mind-fuck to get them to stop calling.
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How do I contact Zabasearch. I just typed in my name. I want my name, address, number removed from the listing.
@befrugalnotcheap:
You don’t have to pay for certified mail!
You pay for C.O.D. [Cash On Delivery}.
And only a fucking idiot would pay for a COD package that arrived that he knew nothing about!
That’s one of the oldest scams around.
The guy in the picture looks like he ‘s getting f*cked somewhere other than the mind…
@PiningForTheFnords: Oh! gotta remember that one. Maybe I’ll try it with my cordless while using the indoor range I just built.
I wonder what they will do when they hear a real .45ACP no more that a foot from the phone.
They always instruct phone people to use a fake name.
I had a really abusive debt collector that was calling me every day for about a week. But one of the last times it had a phone number rather than unavailable. So I did a lookup on the phone number. It was the residence of the bill collector! The first name matched the collector as did the town to that number. She called again like clockwork the next day. When I shared her personal information back with her she hung up. No more calls. The collection agency recinded their actions.
What was really odd was this was federal student loan debt. Why is someone calling me from their house about my student loan? But then again before that I was getting calls from another agency that was using prison inmates to make student loan calls.
That site is scary. Is there any way to get off there withOUT paying the twenty bucks or whatever? And all the addresses of mine on there are old, and, oddly enough, it lists an ex-boyfriend (that I lived w/ for several years) as a resident in my former apartment, which I did NOT share with him. Hmm.
My family used to get a lot of calls from Chase (we had a credit line through them) from some overseas call center. It got annoying enough that we purchased a telephone with call hold “music” which was some crummy midi synth that played classical music. It sounded very, very obnoxious. Anyway, when a telemarketer would call looking for someone, we’d say “please hold” and immediately put on the music for 3-4 minutes. I don’t know how long they’ve held out for, but all of them hung up by then.
We only needed to do it 4 or 5 times before we stopped getting telemarketer calls.
Best $20 I’ve ever spent.
@obfusciatrist: Tell that to my brother, who had to dodge debt collectors calling for some guy named Allen (note: my brother’s name is not Allen) who had the phone number before him. No matter how much he told them that this guy didn’t live there, they kept calling and calling and calling. He eventually disconnected his landline just to get rid of them.
Fortunately I’m fluent in Elvish and Klingon, so I use the telemarketers to practice my verb conjugations.
@ceejeemcbeegee: This makes me sad and happy at the same time.
Hmm. That site has me listed at my parent’s house- the house they moved to a couple years after I moved out on my own. I’ve never lived at that address.
I just tried to “remove” myself from zabasearch. They want a credit card # and $20!!!! What a ripoff. I’d like to see that changed!
Here’s another one – call the obnoxious debt collector back on their 800 number. Wait for them to answer, and then say nothing. Say nothing for as long as you think they’ll stay on the line. Then explain that your gonna do this every day until they stop calling. Explain to them that THEY are paying for the 800 call. Explain to them that you can pretty soon wipe out any profit they think they can make from you by running up their phone bill.
Worked like a charm for me…
@HeartBurnKid: Seriously. harassment suit. After they are told that it is a wrong number (let’s give them one free “ooops”, so let’s call it after they’re told twice) it becomes willful harassment, I’d bet, something you can sue for. People who do actually owe, but have asked that the harassment stop under the FDCPA, have won such lawsuits. An innocent party certainly should!
Getting hit with a summons or judgment should get them to eat crow, and if they don’t pay you can seize their assets to force them to pay. Say, their predictive dialer.
@ceejeemcbeegee: Nuqdaq yuch Dapol? (yum)
@MissTic: Wow. Me too. Looked myself up and there is WAAAAY too much info about me. But they will gladly charge me $20 to remove my information. Hmmm, is this not called extortion? Blackmail? RICO anyone? There needs to be an equivalent of a data “do not call” list that would require a company like zabasearch to check its database against and if you are on the “do not list” list, they have to remove you at no charge. Who’s with me?
@arstal:
In a former life as a telephone surveyor, they told us that that used to be their policy. Then some guy gave his name as Osama Bin Laden. Needless to say, they don’t have that policy anymore.
Cheers!