Guest post by Lucinda Barkeley

Have you ever been the victim of collection harassment for money that you didn’t even owe? Let me tell you, having collection calls from companies when you really owe them the money is bad enough, but when you don’t even have an account with the company that is harassing you it can make you crazy mad! It all started out innocently enough, there was a phone call from a collection agency asking to speak with a person that I had never heard of before. It was one of those recordings, that says “if you are this person, please hold on for an important message, if you are not this person, please hang up now.” So I hung up. And hung up again. And again.

Got to the point where I was hanging up on the collection calls more often than I was talking to people who I actually knew! I had no idea how to stop collection harassment for good with this robo company. Finally I decided that I’d just go ahead and take the call as if I WAS the person that they were looking for, thinking that I could explain to the operator that there was nobody here by that name, and would they please take my telephone number off of their robo collection call procedures. Well, the representative did not want to believe that I was not the person that they were looking for, and gave me a really hard time about it. I asked to speak to the supervisor, and was told that the supervisor was “in a meeting” and could not be disturbed. So I left a message for the supervisor to call me. (Supervisor never DID call me!) But about forty-five minutes later the robo call comes in again.

Margie suggested that I do two things at this point – to Google “stop collection harassment California” and see what resources I can use to make this stop, and to use my telephone features to block the telephone number that the collection calls are coming from. D-UH – why didn’t I think of call-block before? Ah, sweet, sweet peace and quiet; I love you!