American Credit Services, a payday loan collection scam, has come to my attention and I’d like to alert readers to the outline of how these fraudsters work.
Basically, the “company” is calling people and telling them they owe money on a payday loan. Some of the common characteristics of these fake collection calls are:
- Invariably the so-called collectors have moderate to heavy Indian accents. Presumably they are operating out of one of the thousands of offshore call centers in India.
- They start the call in most cases by telling the victim that they need to call their lawyer and appear in court the next day.
- These “collection agents” usually claim to be from some government agency, even claiming to be prosecutors in many cases. For some reason, they usually claim to be associated with the state of California.
- These fraudsters have a good bit of personal information on the people they are calling. They usually have some combination of Social Security Number, bank account and date of birth for the victim.
- They usually ask for a relatively large sum of money, about $1500 in most cases I’ve heard of.
- In some cases, through coincidence or otherwise, they actually claim to be representing a payday loan company that the victim actually owes money to.
The disturbing thing about this collection scam is that they actually appear to have a great deal of information and are targeting payday loan customers. I believe that they must have posed as a lender trying to buy information from payday loan lead generators in order to have so much information on people. Alternatively, they may be gathering information illicitly from insecure payday loan websites.
It is likely that they may change their name or some of their tactics since the word is getting out about this scam. However, it would seem unlikely that they will be able to change the accented workforce that they are using to perpetuate this fraud on innocent payday loan customers.
Even the real “American Credit Service” here in the US, has placed this scam alert on their home page.
For more detailed information on this scam, see the links below:
They also appear to be using the following phone numbers often:
- 941-961-8518
- 714-845-0766
- 714-409-0250
- 310-208-3170
- 714-400-0563
- 213-221-1002
- 213-995-3046
- 310-362-4319
- 714-333-2951
If you have any questions about this scam, please us the Ask Brent section to send me a question.
Tags: Collection Agencies, Lawsuits, Payday Loan Collectors, Payday Loans
