If you've moved, someone listed on the application employer, bank, credit references, or nearest living relative might know where you are. Relatives, friends, employers, and neighbors. Collection agents often call relatives, friends, employers, or neighbors, posing as a friend or relative. However, federal law limits these types of calls. To learn more about what collectors can and cannot do, see Illegal Debt Collection Practices. Phone books. Phone directories, printed or online, are good sources of names, addresses, and phone numbers.
If a collection agency has your phone number, it may be able to find your address using a reverse directory. A reverse directory lists telephone numbers in numeric order, rather than by name. Post office. The agency may check the post office for a forwarding address. Also, major credit bureaus with their own collection agencies receive change-of-address information for each month from the U. Postal Service. Some privacy rights advocates suggest that to prevent collectors from using your change of address information to find your current address, you choose the "temporary" address change when you fill out a change of address request.
That will forward mail for six months, and you can extend it for up to a year, but it won't show up as a permanent change of address in postal records. Alternatively, you can simply notify each person or business you want to know your new address, but not fill out a postal change of address form. Of course, you run the risk that you will forget a business or person you do want to keep in contact with, or whose bills you want to pay on time. You could wind up falling behind on a priority account because you don't get the bills.
State motor vehicle department. In most states, a legitimate creditor or its agent the collection agency can use the motor vehicle department's database to verify your address in order to collect a debt and pursue its legal remedies against you. Voter registration records.
Some collection agents check voter registration records in the county of your last residence. If you've reregistered in the same county, the registrar will have your new address. If you've moved out of county and reregistered, your new county would have forwarded cancellation information to your old county, and the registrar may make that information available. Utility companies. Also read: These 3 people paid off debt and changed their lives. FidoTrack aims to make collecting fun, running competitions that challenge agents to duels and centerwide competitions as they race to recover money while complying with regulations.
Prizes can be choice call-center parking places, team pizza parties, televisions or dinners with bosses. Consumers benefit, he says, as calls shorten and agents become more responsive. Debtors are losing games of hide and seek. Some collectors track debtors on Facebook and other social media sites. A Texas agency is linking Social Security numbers to social media accounts, raising privacy concerns.
In a tactic known as spoofing, some agencies insert local area codes in caller-ID displays, baiting the person being called to answer. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a federal watchdog agency, proposes to ban the practice.
Consumers who feel unfairly treated can complain to the CFPB or sue. Richard Read is a reporter at NerdWallet, a personal finance website. Email: rread nerdwallet. Twitter: RichReadReports.
Home Personal Finance. Debt collectors are using high-tech methods to find you — and your money Published: May 1, at a. You could get rid of debt collectors by writing off your debt. In most common cases, your creditor is the one who has hired the debt collection agency in the first place to collect what you owe to them.
If that is the case, the agency will definitely get most of its information about you from your creditor. This will most likely include different types of contact information as well as financial information regarding your debt. Your credit report is not something that anyone can view. However, certain organizations and agencies are definitely allowed to look up your credit report in order to collect information about you.
As it turns out, debt collection agencies fall under one of the organizations that are allowed to look up your information via your credit report.
This is a very useful resource for them because not only will they get your contact information such as your phone number but they will also get a lot of financial information about you that would be relevant to their goals. Is all this information starting to feel overwhelming? Answer the four questions now. Data brokers are people that collect information about people to later sell it to agencies.
This information would later be sold to interested parties such as a debt collection agency. While most of your personal information is protected under privacy laws, there can certainly be occasions where a collection agency may be able to find you by inquiring about your information from a government agency. Skip tracers are professionals who are hired by organizations in order to trace people that they have been unable to locate. Skip tracers are typically hired in order to locate individuals whose contact information on public records is not accurate anymore.
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