Legal Question in Credit and Debt Law in California

If the debt is not yours, then technically, their activity in calling you does not fall under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, as that set of laws is intended to protect the borrowers from harassing conduct of debt collectors. There are almost certainly a number of theories under which you could pursue recovery and/or perhaps even an injunction against this debt collector, but the question becomes how much are you willing to spend to accomplish this? If you have to go litigate this to get them to stop, it is going to be extremely expensive.

First step is to get a name of the company and address when next they call. Tell them you need to send them a notice under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and they should be willing to give you the company name and address. Send a letter indicating that they need to remove that number from their system as the person they are trying to reach no longer has that number.

Second, hire an attorney to send a letter if the first step doesn't work. That may cost you an hour or two of the attorney's time, but it stands a better chance of putting an end to it than your letter will.

Third, if the second option doesn't work, you have two options - change your number (yes, I get that it is a hassle), or hire an attorney to file suit against the collection company. In spite of what a headache changing your number is, it is so much less costly than litigation that litigation just doesn't even make sense in this context.

I guess a fourth option is to just ignore the calls and delete them from your answering machine. I'm not being a smart-a** here, just being clear that many of these collection agencies operate well outside of the law and reigning them in can be very costly, time-consuming and in the end, extremely frustrating. Good luck.

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