An interesting thing happened the other day. I got the voicemail message below. My first reaction was that it must be a scam call. I deleted it, then started to worry. It sort of bothered me because, there is always the chance that in the hubbub that my life has been for the last year, that some bill got lost or overlooked. I remembered that the voicemail messages first go into a trash can on my iPhone. I retrieved it and took a screenshot.
I took note of the company, Pioneer Credit Recovery, and googled the name It turned out to be a real company. Of course, that got me to thinking that someone was using them as a scam just like they use the FBI or IRS. Then I glanced down the page and saw the link to Consumers Affairs.
The Consumers Affairs page is filled with complaints of hounding phone calls not only to people, who are behind on payments, but people who are getting calls about friends, family, and neighbors. Interesting use of our interconnected public data. One article I read accused them of scraping data from Facebook to locate the family and friends.
This got me to thinking, “Just who are Consumers Affairs? They seem to be a review site, but don’t seem to be known for scamming. I thought I had better look PCR up at the BBB. I looked at the Better Business Bureau website and saw that Pioneer Credit Recovery had 118 complaints there, at the time I looked. I didn’t look at all the complaints, but there was one from a person who was told that they were a “known associate” of the person who owed the money.
So feeling that I had established that they were a bunch of scumbags, but something to be worried about. I sent the above screenshot to my business manager in the states, and asked him to take care of it. When he confronted them, they backed down fast, and said that a “Computer Error” put me into their database and they would remove me at once.
I suspect that their computer error was them buying data from various shady dealers, which linked my phone number to some completely different person. Of course, maybe the official sounding call from my business manager, caused them to feel that I wouldn’t be a good target for putting pressure on a friend, family member, or past neighbor.
I hope I have heard the last of them.