I wonder if I can create a mass tort claim against the people responsible for episodes like this. Behold:
1. On March 28, I received a threatening letter from First Source, LLC, a debt collector. It alleged that I had an account with something called AfterPay U.S., which I have never heard of, for $750, that I never spent, for something that I still have no idea what it was. The letter also said that I now only owed $590.64, since I had paid $187.50, which I have not. My bank doesn’t thinks so either.
2. I called First Source, which …Hallelujah!…has an automated system that got me to a human being almost immediately. That human being was Rhea. She was cordial and professional, and did not constantly read from a script. She heard me out, and said that she would initiate a fraud investigation. I didn’t have to do anything more.
3. Yesterday I received two cheerful emails from AfterPay. Both involved alerting me that I had changed my email associated with my imaginary account. I hadn’t done anything regarding AfterPay, because I still don’t know what the hell it does other than charge people for stuff they never bought, and my email has been the same for 20 years. “Please log into your AfterPay account to view these changes. If this information is incorrect, please update so we have the most up to date information for you,” “Shiara” of Customer Support informed me. “Have a great day.”
Bite me, Shaira.
4. This morning I called FirstSource back to ask what’s going on. But instead of Rhea, I reached Michael, who appeared to be an idiot. As I tried to explain what had happened, he kept reading disclaimers and asking me for the same information I had already given to Rhea and that was already in my file, since it was repeated in the letter FirstSource had sent me. I told him, “I have a simple question you need to answer,” and he replied, “I can’t answer it because you keep interrupting me!” “No,” I said, “I keep asking you to stop reading a script that I have heard already, and to talk to me like a human being, and listen to what I am trying to tell you.” He hung up.
5. I called back and got Michael again. He acted as if we hadn’t just spoken second earlier. He read the same script, an asked me for the same information: my full name, my date of birth, my mailing address, and my “reference number.” It was literally de ja vu: a near exact replay of our previous conversation. This time, he said, “We have closed your account, so you will have to contact AfterPay.” Progress! He then gave me a phone number.
6. I called it. It didn’t work.
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.