Yesterday, we received a phone call from a man who said he was with a company called NCO who was resolving outstanding credit card balances. He wanted to speak with Rob. I said he wasn’t home. He thought that was strange because he had our home number as his work number. He said that Rob had a card with a balance that had probably been lost track of. He was looking to resolve it before sending it to legal. We could pay the balance over the phone. He wanted Rob’s SSN number to be able to give me the rest of the details. I said that I didn’t have it and he decided to “trust me” and tell me that it was about $1,700 and from a Capital One card and the balance was from Aug 2002. He wanted to reassure me this happens all the time and can be easily resolved before he would need to take it to the next step and send it to legal. He said that interest was being added to it everyday and we needed to take care of it. I took his phone number, the details and told him that Rob would call him back.
When I told Rob about it, he couldn’t believe that this could be true. Our credit report had shown nothing about this, and he was certain that he closed out a Capital One card some years back. So, last night we called Capital One to make sure and they had no record of any outstanding balances which they had none. The other funny thing was that the man from NCO said that he had our home phone as Rob’s work number. We didn’t have that home number in 2002.
This morning, Rob called the guy back at the supposed “resolution” company. Rob mentioned that he had received no letters and that he doesn’t believe there is anything outstanding. The first thing Rob asked for was the account number that the man was referring to for our “outstanding balance”. Instead of answering, the man asked for the last 4 digits of Rob’s SSN. Rob gave it to him, and the man said that he had the wrong Robert Atkins because it didn’t match and hung up. If it didn’t match, where did he get the phone number from? We found out that NCO is a legitimate company, however we’re not sure that this was a legitimate call from them.
This sounds like a scam to us. We’re not overly skeptical people, but we tend to notice when things are fitting into place. Just a cautionary tale.
10 years ago
2 comments:
Hey Guy's its Ryo, yep it sounds 100% like a scam. I would be real cautious and check everything out and keep a close eye on all your accounts. All they really need is your last 4 digits of our SSN, I had to do some banking over the phone with wells fargo to fix a internal transfer mistake, all they need is a account number , name and the last 4 digits of your SSN to validate who you are. Any other info like mothers names or birthdates can easily be gathered online. Stay safe guys!
Update: Thanks, Ryo - good info. Even after we thought we cleared this up almost 2 wks ago, we were still receiving messages daily from this company threatening telling us we're in debt collection. Appears to be a legit company, but they still have the wrong phone number associated with this account. I called up today and asked them for the 4 digits of the person they were referencing and middle initial which did not match Rob's. I asked them their process for acquiring phone numbers for outstanding balances and they basically do a search for a similar name based on last known address. No real science there. At my request, they have flagged our number now as do-not-call. Let's see if that works...
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