7. I called back. I reached Rhea! She didn’t read from a script. She remembered that she had taken my call last week. She said that I should not have received those emails from AfterPay, and that someone there had somehow mistaken her fraud alert for me changing my contact information. I told her about the bad phone number I had received from her (idiot) colleague. She confirmed that it was a wrong number, and gave me another. She apologized for the confusion. I told her I loved her.
8. The number she gave me didn’t work.
9. I called back. This time I reached Michael, who, I realized, sounded exactly like Carlton Your Doorman from “Rhoda”. He began again to ask me for all the information I had already given him as if we had never spoken. I interrupted and asked if he could transfer me to Rhea. “Sure,” he said. After putting me on hold for a few second, he came back on the line and said, “No, I can’t do that. You’ll have to call back.” “And how can I make sure I reach Rhea and not you?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said. And hung up.
10. So I called back. This time, unlike my previous four calls, I was stuck listening to Muzak for ten minutes while Carlton, that is, Michael, didn’t answer the phone, either because he didn’t want to talk to me again, because he was trying to let me get to Rhea, or because he had forgotten how.
11. I got to Rhea, who again was sympathetic, professional, and helpful. I told her the second number didn’t work. She said there had been a miscommunication and one digit was off. (I probably wrote it down wrong because my blood pressure was spiking.) She said that I should not be getting any more emails from AfterPay, and that the debt collection account with FirstSouce had been closed.
12. Phone number #3 worked! I reached an AI assistant that I asked for a live agent. “I’m sure I can help you if you explain your situation,” “she” said. I explained. She told me an agent would be on the line momentarily, and one was, after I had been told that I would be surveyed after the call. This one, however, was in Ceylon or somewhere and spoke very quickly in some kind of pidgin English delivered in a cartoon voice. Again I explained my issue and she said (I think), “I will check our records and be right back.” Then a male survey voice broke in. “Were you satisfied with the service you just received? Press “One” for “Yes” and “Two” for “No.” I pressed “Two” for “No.”
13. I called back. This time I got a different Ceylonese woman who spoke very quickly in some kind of pidgin English delivered in a cartoon voice. I couldn’t seem to get her to understand that my main concern was not the emails about my email address, but the $750 bill for something I never bought. All she kept saying is, “We will not be contacting you via email again.”
14. Finally I gave up and ended the call. My morning is shot, and I have no faith that this is the end of the matter.
How many productive hours are wasted in the U.S. by this kind of ineptitude, bad training and crossed wires? How can anyone who experiences these debacles trust the government to run any system, service or department competently when much smaller bureaucracies are so unreliable?
Once again I am trying to decide between the wood-chipper as a final remedy for me alone, and a machete, to endorse Sweeny Todd’s solution to the ethics rot in humanity.
I may flip a coin…
[I apologize for having to resort to the awful Tim Burton “Sweeney Todd’ film for a YouTube video of “Epiphany,” but it’s the only clear video available. The critical lyrics:
There’s a hole in the world
Like a great black pit
And it’s filled with people
Who are filled with shit
And the vermin of the world
Inhabit it—
But not for long!
They all deserve to die!
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett
Tell you why
Because in all of the whole human race, Mrs. Lovett
There are two kinds of men and only two
There’s the one staying put
In his proper place
And the one with his foot
In the other one’s face
Look at me, Mrs Lovett
Look at you!
No, we all deserve to die
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett
Tell you why
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us, death will be a relief
We all deserve to die!
Ethics Alarms 
Jack,
Kind warning, but I wouldn’t engage any further with either Afterpay or the debt collector. If you didn’t spend the money, and you don’t know the company, and your bank knows nothing about it, leave it alone. The collector might be in on it with Afterpay or Afterpay is conning them also to legitimate their scam somehow. Either way, it does you no harm to leave it alone to rot on it’s own. If it shows up on your credit report (which it likely won’t, if it really is fraudulent) you can always contest it then.
My mother, now in her 70s, receives letters, phone calls, and emails like this on a near-daily basis. Changing her number has helped, but once someine begins to engage with scammers, they spread the information far and wide as a “easy mark.” BEWARE!
I don’t think ignoring it would be wise. First Source, LLC exists, AfterPay U.S. exists, they are both legitimate companies. I recommend sending the debt validation letter at a minimum. I’m concerned that ignoring this now may result in even more “red tape” to clean up later.
I only replied to your comment because I would be uncomfortable ignoring something like this where I got an actual letter in the mail rather than an email. If it were an email, I’d also say ignore it. Jack can still accept your advice.
Well, you probably know this but I’ll put it here just in case.
Send a debt validation letter to First Source, LLC by certified mail, return receipt requested. The FDCPA (Fair Debt Collection Practices Act) gives you 30 days from the first letter to request validation. Even though you called, the written request is legally binding. First Source then has to stop collection activity until they prove the debt is real.
Of course, this is spending even more time that you probably don’t have.
I’m sure other commenters will have some input.
It looks like First Source LLC is located in Mumbai, India, although they may have centers in the U.S.
I also thought this might be some sort of scam, even if the only purpose is to collect your personal information. I typically ignore any notices of “payments” for things that I haven’t any knowledge of, unless I hear about it from my bank.
It is also possible that this is the result of someone who has already obtained some of your personal information and was using the Afterpay app to purchase something and leaving you stuck with the bill.
Afterpay seems to be a real ” buy now, pay later” company, but probably mostly used by people who are less than savvy on finances & credit use. It’s also open to fraudsters setting up fake accounts using someone else’s stolen info, leaving the victims to fight collection attempts.
It’s a pain, but probably best to do as others have suggest and generate confirmable written disputes to all parties to protect your credit.
Unlike the other commenters, I am not a good source of advice. Instead, I am sharing in your pain. My second child is medically and educationally complex. She has medical supplies delivered here once a month. She has a 27 standing appointments each month for a combination of her doctors and her varied medical and educational therapies. Then there are the appointments that occur randomly (pulls out her specialized feeding tube requiring a 250 mile one way drive to get it put back in, for example), bimonthly, quarterly, etc. I also have four other children, all of whom need some degree of medical care, through the year, even if it is only the preventative type. What this means is that we get bills for medical/therapy/supplies all the time. It is not uncommon for us to also get bills where they typed in the insurance number wrong, or misspelled a name. Paperwork errors between insurance and doctors occur very often and I spend at least three hours figuring out the cause of the latest and greatest mistake made in medical and billing paperwork each month.
You have my sympathy! If you ever come up with a way to make poorly paid idiots learn how to actually help instead of read from a script written by a demented AI and to actually document (and furthermore, read previous documentation) your problems, I would love to hear it. Until then, I’ll waste a day and a half every year simply fighting on the phone with these issues.