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.
I did check on both companies, especially the law firm. It’s legit.
I know what phishing is.
This wasn’t it.
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.
Sounds like someone is fishing for your personal info. Never call the # given by a letter, text, or phone call about some financial issue you know nothing about. Look up the official # and address for that company. Then contact them via certified mail with a copy of the info received, but no more personal info. Done. You might want to put a freeze on your credit reports. We get these scam notices all the time, usually by email. The most recent claimed to be from Walmart’s fraud department saying a $2099 charge had been made on our account. There is no such account with that store, and the REAL fraud dept said this is a very common scam aimed to panic recipients into handing over personal info.
I am posting this here because the topic has a certain amount of overlap with what institutions are doing to me right now, in slow motion and at arms length.
When I came to Australia, I kept some financial accounts going in the U.K. These have recently been giving me trouble, so I want to run the issues past readers to get your feedback and suggestions. For now, I will just tell you about what has happened with the Nationwide Building Society.
About a year ago, they sent me a suspicious letter asking me to send them identification details with authentication or they would freeze and then seize my funds until I complied, small though those are at just a few pounds. I certainly didn’t want to help someone pretend to be me. What was even more suspicious was that the letter was unsigned and had no reference I could check, so naturally I queried Nationwide through other channels. They immediately registered that as a complaint, which at that stage it was not. Eventually, though only after much prodding, they confirmed that the demand was authentic and gave me other necessary information that the letter and a follow up letter had omitted, so I set about finding how to comply – and that was when I got grounds for complaint.
They wanted me to go into a U.K. branch, to use a mobile telephone’s scanning to confirm my passport, or to send them a notarised photocopy of that. But a notary would cost about five times the amount at stake, as my enquiries found, and buying and setting up a mobile telephone just for them would cost even more!
So I complained, first to Nationwide and then to the U.K. financial ombudsman, who had helped with an earlier matter with a different lot of funds and institutions. This time, I got nowhere. Both Nationwide and the ombudsman misrepresented my complaint as being about being asked to provide identification, though I repeatedly told all of them that it was about being ordered to pay for the costs of authenticating the identification, which is an operational matter distinct from identification as such. (In fact, though I did not tell them this, anyone capable of concocting identification could just as easily concoct notarisation, so that would also need to be checked separately.) They even made out that I was contractually obliged to do all that, even though it would more than destroy any consideration a contract needs to be binding, and added insult to injury by making out that seizing my funds was about safeguarding my funds!
To cut a long story short, the ombudsman has just ruled against me, citing inter alia that Nationwide had provided for zero cost authentication in the form of mobile telephone scanning, and never mind that I had repeatedly told them I didn’t have those facilities (for unrelated reasons we need not go into, having to do with a failed communications “upgrade” here some years ago); no “you must take your victims as you find them” here. That’s over and above treating it as all being only about identification and never addressing my actual complaint about being forced to pay for Nationwide’s operational need to check my identification, on pain of losing my funds. And that was after I made several constructive suggestions about how Nationwide could check my identification themselves at little or no cost, like taking my passport photocopies to the passport office for confirmation, faxing or emailing those there to do that, or just doing the same scanning they falsely made out I could do.
There’s a saying, “when someone says it’s about the principle, not the money, it’s about the money”. Here, it’s both: I can’t comply without losing several times as much even if I wanted to (the money), and they’ve got some nerve demanding that I do their work of checking things for them at my expense (the principle), particularly because NOBODY CAN FARM OUT CHECKING ANYWAY! If you try, it isn’t checking.
So, now, I can’t touch my own funds with them ever again, unless things change for the better. “He who is faithful in little is also faithful in much”, so we know for sure that Nationwide is perfectly capable of salami slicing many others’ funds in much the same way until much more is diverted, all the while making out that their funds are still held in their names. Here is how I ended my last email to Nationwide the other day, trying unsuccessfully to get their attention on the real issues:-
“To remind you, it would be absurd for me to pay for the only remaining method of authentication you allowed, notarisation, since that would cost me several times more than the amount at risk of seizure, just as would buying and setting up a mobile telephone simply to scan codes for you. (Even if the amount at risk were large enough to make yielding to your demands to pay for authentication for you cost effective, it would still be an affront to the conscience for me to pay for your operational practices.) I hope that, with these suggestions, you can find the flexibility to explore options that are not absurd, but I cannot stop you seizing my funds without taking similarly disproportionately costly steps of my own. Just because you can do that does not mean you should, but if you do I see no reason why your practices should not receive wider and more public attention; it is not as though you see anything wrong in them.”
So, I am now trying to get that wider and more public attention (I may contact British newspapers next), and with any luck some constructive suggestions. After that, maybe in a few days, I will post about how a bank’s attempts to compensate me are tending to incriminate me of tax fraud, by claiming that I solicited their scheming that I have been trying to resist. If I cannot get documentation clearing me, I will have to throw myself on the mercy of the Australian tax authorities before ever increasing delay in doing so makes me look even guiltier.
Any way you could go above the ombudsman you said ruled against you? A way to appeal, find a pro-bono lawyer for a civil suit, or at least add legal feeds to the suit?
Not really, not without having to do a whole lot of work from here to get those things, amounting to cost in itself. I have limited communications, so I can’t just do it off the peg – and that is what really drives all this.