Released: August 20, 2007

Complaints mount about debt collectors

Source: Phuong Cat Le, Seattle PI

The calls started at 8 a.m. and were repeated a dozen times a day. Sometimes the person on the other end called and hung up. Other times he blasted loud music onto her answering machine.

When Krista Weeks picked up the phone, she said, the debt collector called her “a liar” and “a deadbeat” and told her to pay up. But the debt wasn’t hers and she had a stack of canceled checks to prove it.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” Carrie Andersen of Everett [WA] said of the repeat calls she got for a man named Michael. “They wouldn’t stop. It was like they were harassing me.” The callers had the wrong number.

Despite her best efforts to tell Receivables Performance Management, or RPM, that her account was in good standing, its representatives kept calling, said Weeks, a health technician who lives in Richland. “They’d call, and you can hear them say that we were a bunch of damn liars,” she said.

Read Full Article: Complaints mount about debt collectors