I received a call from Riddle & Associates this morning - the associate refused to tell me what he was calling in reference to just kept yelling at me to verify my name. I was told that I needed to behave, stop making things harder on myself because it would be easy enough to find me. After numerous calls - the guy kept calling hanging up, breathing on the phone, telling me to verify my name or he would ruin my credit forever - I finally decided to call my local police department. An officer called Riddle & Associates - first this person tried to say that I started calling them yelling and they had it on tape; when the officer asked them to play the tape, they said it was in the archives. Both the officer and I thought that was rather fishy that the alleged tape had made it to the archives so quickly.
When we finally got to the bottom of the matter, they were calling on a credit card (about 10 years old) that I closed out with a zero balance. They claim I owe them $131.00- told me to pay it or else they would make things hard on me. I tried explaining that I'd never gotten any correspondance from their organization and had no idea what he was trying to collect on, to no avail. I asked the associate if he could fax or e-mail some sort of proof of the debt - he told me to just pay up if I wanted to be left alone. I was also told that he didn't have to send me anything as proof and if I knew what was best for me, I would pay now and stop complaining. I have credit monitoring so I decided to pull my report just to make sure I wasn't mistaken - guess what? There is absolutley NO mention of them, or this alleged credit card debt anywhere on my report.
The end result was, I filed a phone harassment report with my local police department and sent a "cease contact" letter to the address I found on the internet for them. From my personal experience, it seems like they are a buch of scam artists that are trying to collect on invalid/previously paid off debts. Beware if they should try and contact you - do not send them any money unless they can provide your proof, which I'm sure they will not be able to or will start screaming and being rude.
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