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If you get a letter or phone call from a company calling itself Asset Recovery Associates or Financial Credit Service, do NOT, under any circumstances, give them your credit card number or bank routing numbers. I guess a bad economy brings out even more bottom-feeders and scam artists than usual.
In my case, the collection account was nonexistent (the original creditor has no record of ever having issued the account number and no trace of my social security number in its systems) and even if it had been a real account, the date of last activity was over 15 years past the statute of limitations in my state.
If you are contacted by them, they may actually have your social security number, and if you talk to them on the phone, they will quote little tidbits of information from a recent report to a) intimidate you into thinking they can really do something to hurt you and b) make you think they're legit. Don't give them any more information than they already have. If your experience is like mine, you'll have one of the weirdest phone conversations of your life with these people.
I found out they'd put a hard inquiry in one of my credit bureau files, and I filed a dispute with the bureau immediately. Hard inquiries can affect your score, and I didn't want this sleazy-looking inquiry sitting out there the next time my legitimate creditors run an audit. It usually takes over a month to resolve disputes, but this one was fixed in under 24 hours.
I'm sending a dispute of the debt to ARA within the 30-day window via regular mail and certified/return receipt on the advice of my attorney. We'll see what happens after that.
Googling this company turned up all sorts of interesting information. Apparently, one of its officers was named as a defendant in the 2004 FTC action against CAMCO, a debt collector shut down by the feds due to abusive/illegal practices.
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