Collection agency spoofing local numbers to "trick" people in answering.
Used the following #'s 513-252-2339 513-898-1033 513-348-1009
The use a dialer system so you get a pause and also robo voice stating please hold ..
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OkieGirl
They are calling me from spoofed Oklahoma City numbers too.
405-213 405-220 405-708 405-212 405-308 405-455
I called back one of these numbers and it spoofed to a number in Michigan. A recording gave me the name of the company (FBCS). I filed a complaint with the FTC, as I believe this is illegal.
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Angry as Hell
I believeI got another call from them.. the # was 513-373-8??? did not get a chance to write down the remaining 3 .. I answered to get them my attorney's name and all I got is a robo voice saying HELLO, HELLO, HELLO..
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Angry as Hell
| 6 replies
Received another call today from 513-252-2339 and talked to Tabatha Strong. She was quite aggresive. She did not verify that she was talking to the correct person and disclosed the information to me. After informing her she violated the FDCPA she said she did not that I said yes to when she asked for me. She never verified my address eihter. I gave her my attorney's name per I am middle of filing BK. I talked to my attorney about FDCPA violations and they stated they were but not not a strong case. Said thatthey actually talked to me that it would be tough. I did ask about the spoofing of numbers. They stated that if I was/will be able to get them on something stronger (ie calling me again at work) then they can also put that in the complaint. I know someone questioned at one time about if spoofing #'s is illegel.
The "Truth in Caller ID Act" makes it illegal to spoof with the expectation of gain. Clearly a CA spoofing has expectation of gain.
However, they are probably NOT engaged in illegal spoofing, even though they may be transmitting caller id info for a variety of numbers scattered around the country.
DIDs are dirt cheap. They take seconds to order and provision, and seconds to get rid of. If the CA calling you holds the DID that they are displaying, even if it is not provisioned to accept incoming calls, you are going to have little chance of persuading a judge that they were engaged in illegal spoofing. Instead, to win that argument, you will likely have to catch them transmitting a DID which belongs to someone else (your Great Aunt Hortense or your employer, for example), an unassigned DID, or an invalid number like 111-222-3333.
Just for reference, I purchased a couple of DIDs this afternoon. It cost me $0.50 to activate them. I will pay less than $2/month to keep them. They became functional within seconds of my clicking the submit button on the order screen. They appear to be located over a thousand miles from where I am sitting. So there's really no reason to think a CA wouldn't have a bunch of phone numbers to hide behind.
The line they called you from was provided by Level3 Communications, and I feel sure that it is a DID your tormentor legitimately holds. Sorry to give you bad news. They may have committed other violations, but unless there is something you have not shared, I doubt they have any spoofing transgressions.
On the positive side, now that you have referred them to your attorney and advised them you are in BK, calling you again would be what is known in formal legal parlance as "screwing the pooch".
Your attorney may have less to work with than you think. I have only your summary here and not a direct call transcript, but it says that an agency dialed your number, only you responded, a rep asked for you, and you confirmed your name. You make a claim out of that, it will be argued, I think successfully, that there cannot be a privacy breach just because you weren't drilled for additional info.
The FDCPA does not tell collectors how to verify identity, or even that they must. It merely suggests between the lines that live reps exercise care when greeting a person. All the current hand-wringing over disclosure versus privacy traces back to the famed 2006 decision on Foti-v-NCO, a case stemming from quite uncommon circumstances. The absurd verbal gymnastics now performed by collection reps and agency phone messages to authenticate a call recipient are not directed by a clear legal mandate but urged by fear of getting sued, rightly or not, over ambiguous rules written for an era of hardwired rotary phones under manual control.
The Truth In Caller ID Act, as cited by Stranger, is a blind alley for consumer litigant claims. It wasn't written to address debt collection, it has no private right of action, and a covered call requires both an aim for gain *and* intentional fraud. A South Asian faker with a bogus "hot check" claim spoofing a Chuck E. Cheese in Ohio would qualify. A domestic agency chasing a real account through a weird phone number it controls without an obviously misleading CNAM won't get you there.
It's not all bad news, as I'm irritated enough by the industry practice of using spurious local numbers to make FDCPA claims anyway. For reasons stated, I don't touch TICIA, but argue deceptive practice on the premise that those goofy numbers come and go like the wind and only exist to entrap an intended victim. If there is no call center in my area code, and the local number bounces my return calls, and the agency always clearly directs me to use a "normal" phone number, that to me is an easy 1692e(10) claim.
The claim is fortified when I point out that the number might be a spoof and poor "least sophisticated" me can't tell for sure. If the opponent wants to claim its abundance of caution because I'm screening strange numbers, I'd declare truthfully my total lack of phone blocking devices, then haul out my X-dozen recordings of me answering their stupid peek-a-boo calls.
Stern warning here: I've not had judicial review of my "local number trap" claim and don't know of a good case which has. Your lawyer probably won't go for it, and he's right to desire a very clear violation as a case hook. Working pro se, I can be much less averse to risk, but even I would not skate a whole case on a "fishy looking number" complaint.
You'll have to mine the existing and future communications for various lies, trickery, and abuse and build from there. Stranger correctly notes that you've set a useful trap of your own by announcing your lawyer's involvement. Good hunting to you.
Meantime, watch this space for the late night arrival of a frequent site visitor who will storm in here and misread the thread, make peevish and fatally flawed rebuttals, strongly hint that Lone Stranger and I are two heads of the same despicable hydra, make some bratty fantasizing remark about our hidden motives, then maybe throw a pseudo-folksy tantrum ending in the word "Period" when yet again not one hiss of accusation can be substantiated.
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Angry as Hell
| 1 reply
Thanks Resident and Stranger for your input along with my attorney. They stated I would have a case but very week. But if they continue to call now I would have a case based on the fact I gave them my attorney's info and also i informed them not to call my work.
Oh, yeah, let's see how crazy they are now. You could use the easy money. Notice of your legal rep is actually enough but it doesn't hurt to have the PoE revocation.
"Meantime, watch this space for the late night arrival of a frequent site visitor"
Really?
Somehow I've missed this midnight maligning. I went back through the secret vaults and found only one thread where we were being accused of hydra status - but I'm sure I missed something. With just over a thousand candidate threads I got bored looking.
As long as we are promulgating wild theories, perhaps our accuser has experienced a failure of the left temporoparietal junction, and we are in fact both him/her? That would be really bad news for all three of us.
Like you, I've tried to keep a sense of humor about retaliations and potshooting, which I get a few times a month from all directions. I think back to an early lesson in a great art instruction book: "Do not accept negative criticism from those who are unfit to judge."
From one source you've been targeted or winged at other times, and so has at least one other site reg'lar. Some of the debris, generally not funny at all, has long since been swept by Admin. I've thought hard about claiming to be roughly 38 aliases here, like the forums are just my little Potemkin Village, but I just can't hit that low.
I know for fact I couldn't impersonate you without busting a vessel in my forehead. Something you wrote a couple years back -- specifically about the psychology of desire as manipulated by retailers -- I thought for sure had to come from a closet columnist or a refugee from a think tank. It was too good for a mystery call forum. I've had it clipped 'n' saved since. That's before I came to use this site more often and get to know the population.
P.S. re: "without an obviously misleading CNAM won't get you there"
It may be worth mentioning that CNAM is not as ephemeral as CNUM. I can change CNUM from one call to the next, but since the CNAM is looked up from third party databases, based on the CNUM, changes must be submitted and propagated. So, while one can certainly have a specious name appear in the CID info, as we see with the "Card Services" scam calls, some tricksters prefer to take the path of least resistance and spoof the CNUM which corresponds to the CNAM they want to display - i.e. it is simpler just to use Carlos E. Queso's actual phone number and let Ma Bell do the work. This also leaves less of a trail than submitting a false CNAM for your LIDB record if the big boys get interested in your activity. I can claim human error if I "accidentally" type the wrong DID into the system, but submitting a blatantly false CNAM for a DID I own is hard to explain as a typo.
As for the pea and shell phone number game violating FDCPA, I have had thoughts along those lines as well. It can certainly be used not only to deceive people into picking up the phone, but also to create emotional distress as well.
I think asserting an FDCPA violation might well fly as icing on the cake when there are other abuses to underpin it, but as a standalone I think it would be a tough sell. Lots of VOIP lines for playing hide and seek seem to be the norm for most CAs. But combine it with midnight calls, blast dialing, spoofing a hospital or the police, or other out of bounds behavior, and I think that "boys will be boys" leniency would go up in a puff of greasy black smoke.
To your very valid "Do not accept negative criticism from those who are unfit to judge." I will add that if you haven't made a few enemies in life you probably aren't accomplishing much. And to quote an old Joel McCrea/Randolph Scott movie, "All I want is to enter my house justified".
There are those on here, you among them, whose criticism would matter to me, but the nattering gnats are a mote on the wind, and unworthy of notice.
That you found something I wrote worthy of your time and consideration is an honor, for which I am sincerely grateful. Thank you.
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