Slashdot Mirror
Debt Collectors Using Facebook To Embarrass Those Who Owe
Not even the tranquility of FarmVille can save you from the long arm of debt collectors. Melanie Beacham says that a collector from MarkOne Financial contacted her relatives about her past due car note via Facebook. She is filing suit alleging that the company is harassing her family. Tampa based consumer attorney Billy Howard of Morgan & Morgan says, "Now Facebook does a debt collectors work for them. Now it's not only family members, it's all of your associates. It's a very powerful tool for debt collectors to use."
Working for a major financial institution (disclaimer: while I am not going to identify said FI, what I say in no way is a representation or an opinion of the FI itself, but only personal opinion of myself based on experience), I have seen a lot of fraud occur this way. The typical scam going around is that someone calls you, says they are collecting on a debt and that they will soon be initiating legal action against you and it can be easily avoided by paying a percentage and then that they will clear it off the books and erase it permanently from your credit report. Then they ask for your card# (and if they are really bold, they'll ask for the CVV2 code on the back of the card) along with the expiration, and then proceed to create a cloned card and rack up as many fraudulent charges as possible before the bank suspects fraud and shuts the card off. It's become so common that when I see certain transactions, I know what has happened before the person I'm talking to has even said that they had someone call them up in this manner. To be quite honest, debit and credit card fraud is at a very high level currently.