Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

Left arm is definitely getting better. I’ve actually devised a technique for two-handed typing that doesn’t hurt too badly: I cross my right leg over my left, and then prop my left wrist on my right knee. With my wrist supported I can actually type reasonably well on the left side, but of course I’m nowhere near my accustomed 100+ wpm speed.

It’s been an interesting experiment in not using my left hand. For the first couple of days life was tough. Getting dressed was an experience. Cutting a steak proved impossible the day I pulled the muscle, though I managed the next day with only some minor screaming when I moved my wrist the wrong way.

Much of what I’ve been doing has been sorting magazines on the lower level prior to re-shelving them. My Atlantics were in a disorderly heap before, as were Electronics Illustrated, Commonweal, and Wired. I ended up sitting tailor-style on our newly cushy floor and creating year-piles all around me. Then I shell-sorted each year-pile into month order, and finally hoisted each sorted year one-handed and placed the mags on the shelf. I’ve wanted to do that for years, but it always seemed a bad use of my time…until a bad supinator suddenly made it a good use of my time.

I discovered earlier today that a dead SX270 makes a dandy bookend; see above. Very good way to keep sorted year-stacks of mags vertical while I sort the rest of the pile on the floor. I have another one upstairs that isn’t dead, but may be of more value to me as a bookend than as a computer. Then again, I use my Sixer and my Twoer as bookends, even though they’re in tip-top condition. If I can ever find anybody who wants to QRP QSO on AM, I’ve got more than enough old power transformers to hold up my QSTs.

Have some hope that tomorrow will see a return to something like normal life, with occasional yelps. I’ll let you know.

One of the things that may be going on with all the NCTUE letters people in Colorado have been receiving in recent days (see my last two entries) is a debt collection agency fishing for “zombie debt.”

There’s a great deal about this online. It turns on a peculiarity in the law regarding debt and the statute of limitations: If a debt collector can persuade a debtor with an expired debt to pay even a penny of that debt (lying through their teeth that doing so will remove the negative event on their credit report) the statute of limitations can be reset, and the debtor may then be liable for the full amount of the expired debt.

The debt is basically brought back to life to haunt the debtor.

This is the sort of thing that may technically be legal but strikes most people as a species of fraud. Doesn’t matter: Whatever you do, never pay anything to a debt collector to settle an expired debt–or that debt’s teeth will soon be gnawing at your wallet. Brains, feh. All it wants is your money.

We don’t know yet what’s going on involving NCTUE letters in Colorado. But a zombie debt scam is possibly underway. It might working something like this:

1. A shady debt collection agency buys (or simply invents) a bunch of old (or fictitious) debts.
2. The agency files these debts with NCTUE.
3. NCTUE dutifully sends out notices that they’ve received negative information for your account. (These are the letters that people have been getting.)
4. At this point, the collection agency may begin calling or sending letters to the people named on its expired (or fictitious) debts. They may also simply wait for concerned consumers to contact them. (Don’t! Especially by phone.) They may offer to settle a debt and remove the negative credit entry for a small sum.
5. A few people may consent to do this. As soon as the collection agency receives the settlement payment, they begin dunning the hapless submitter for the full amount of the expired (or fictitious) debt. That’s the payoff. Note that the collection agency probably bought the debt, and owns it. Whatever money they can get out of those named in the debt goes to them and belongs to them. The original owners of the debt are no longer involved and have no stake in the debt payments.
6. In the case of truly fictitious debts, the supposed debtor isn’t on the hook for anything–but any money sent to the collection agency is probably gone forever.

This has been done many times before. Note that the scenario is still hypothetical in this case. I’m in the process of checking to see who filed an entry under my name with NCTUE. I’m also waiting for some contact by a debt collection agency. I always screen phone calls, but I’ll be doing so a lot more consistently now. What I do later on depends completely on what I learn in the next few days. Stay tuned.

I think we’re starting to get a sense for the scam here, as mentioned in my entry for yesterday, 3/10/2012. The scam involves NCTUE, but may have have been initiated by one of several collection agencies, including the AFNI collection agency of Bloomington, Illinois. (AFNI is by no means the only one.) It works like this: a debt collection agency “re-ages” an expired debt (that is, a debt that is older than the statute of limitations) and attempts to collect it. They send notification of the debt to credit reporting services like Equifax, and then attempt to collect the debt, using the bad credit mark as a sort of threat. Enough people apparently send such agencies money to keep the business model alive.

That sounds illegal to me, but it can get worse: Some collection agencies have been known to invent debt from whole cloth and then attempt to collect it, which, of course, is a species of fraud and should be prosecuted.

I’m not sure what happened in our case, since Carol and I have never let any bill go unpaid. Nor am I sure (yet) that this is what happened. We’re still looking into it, and as you might expect, not much is going to be resolved on a weekend.

There is evidently some connection with Verizon Wireless, which Carol and I contracted with for the very first time ever last fall, when we bought new smartphones. Needless to say, we haven’t missed any payments. AFNI apparently bought some ancient debt from companies that Verizon later purchased back in the 1990s, and has been trying to collect on it. (More here.) The number of accounts purchased by AFNI is immense.

I’m seeing a lot of reports of letters received in Colorado over the past couple of days, so whatever agency is doing this may be mounting an effort on a state-by-state basis, and this week it was just our turn.

What this may mean (again, we don’t know yet) is that some collection agency may have submitted a mass of fraudulent debt notices to credit reporting services (like Equifax’s NCTUE) which is now dutifully notifying people that a negative entry has been added to their credit reports. If that turns out to be the case, NCTUE is not scamming at all, but just doing what they’re supposed to do, and may be required to do by law. We may object to how they do it, but it may not be NCTUE engaging in malfeasance, but the collection agencies.

Be sure to read up on how to deal with collection agencies generally, and send no money to any of them unless you’re absolutely sure that you owe it. Fight them like a cornered animal. Here’s one report from a person who did it successfully.

Good luck.

Carol and I got a letter this afternoon from the National Consumer Telecom and Utilities Exchange (NCTUE), a subsidiary of Equifax based in Atlanta. As best I can tell (I’ve never heard of it before today) the NCTUE is a way for phone companies and utility companies to exchange data on deadbeat customers, so that when a guy who owes three grand to the phone company moves to another state, the phone company there can examine his application with a more critical eye and possibly deny the account. In that it’s a lot like a conventional credit reporting firm, albeit a vertical-market one.

The letter was very plain, not on any sort of letterhead, and relatively crude by my standards. (I could have set up a mail merge like that using a spreadsheet twenty years ago.) It did not come with a glossy explanatory flyer, as I would expect. The key message in the letter is this: According to Colorado law, a consumer reporting agency (like NCTUE) is required to send a free report to consumers who receive either:

• Eight credit inquiries (no indication of a timeframe) from a telecom or utility firm; or
• A single report that adds negative information to someone’s NCTUE file.

To receive a “free disclosure copy” of our report, it suggests that we either call the number 1-866-349-5185 or fill out the bottom third of the letter sheet and send it to:

Exchange Service Center – NCTUE
PO Box 105161
Atlanta GA 30348

The phone number is a robot that immediately asks for your social security number, and provides no option to speak to a human being. The sheet requires your social security number and date of birth, along with a signature. Needless to say, they’re not getting it. Carol and I have an autopay system for all telecom/utility payments, and we keep the autopay account well-stoked. Our use is fairly predictable, and nothing has changed in a long time. The account has plenty of money in it, and no bills have failed to be paid on time. (We checked.)

Interestingly, the NCTUE Web site is not accessible right now. When I try to go to nctue.com, I get a “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” message. What this suggests is that NCTUE is engaging in some shady marketing. If they recently dumped several million of these letters in the mail, their web site may well not be able to handle the traffic. I doubt that we got the letter because of some mistake in our own payment management. I’m guessing that gazillions of people got the same letter, and they all arrived today, and everybody is trying to go up there at once and see WTF is going on.

Either that, or they’ve pissed off enough people to earn a DDOS attack…but somehow I doubt it.

It’s unclear what NCTUE is trying to sell, and I’ll keep investigating. I’m guessing Equifax (their parent company) is trying to hawk some kind of credit protection plan, but since I won’t hand them my SS number, it’s hard to tell. In the meantime, I’d be interested in hearing if you’ve received this letter and what, if anything, you’ve done in response.

UPDATE 3/11/2012: One thing I forgot to ask people to mention in their comments: Are you in Colorado? I’m trying to determine if this effort on NCTUE’s part (whatever it turns out to be) depends on some quirk in Colorado law, or if it’s national in scope.

Also, read my next entry, for 3/11/2012!